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I've got a real soft spot for Awk but any time I want to get anything done I have to read the manual.

I know I like it, but I'd have to be working with it alot more for the basics to sink in.

And the thing is that in almost all cases Python or (ugh) bash can get the same job done so I rarely pick up Awk.

I use awk very often at my current job when analyzing our logs. I've been slowly compiling a list of useful shell pipelines, the majority of which involve awk. Any time I need to do some novel analysis, I can steal the syntax/ideas from myself

Mawk on debian is super fast and can determine statistics like messages/sec, uniq ip addresses for a particular user, etc from 10GB log files very quickly.

I use 'tldr' for that. It's a great man summary tool.

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