This suggests an opening for a Perl/Python intro focused on the exact same tasks, admittedly. That seems more realistic for Perl -- unless there's someone who writes Python one-liners at the shell?
May as well open up vim, write my 7 lines of python, and run it. Because I use it everyday and didn't have to look anything up it ends up far faster. Then when I am done I either delete it, throw it in a scripts directory, or make it part of some existing infrastructure repo. Now if I keep it because I used python it is much more readable than the awk 1 liner would have been.
I have tried in earnest to memorize awk's idiosyncrasies multiple times now. By the time I go to use what I learned the last time it is months later and I have forgot enough I need to go look stuff up.
So in a way, here I am: The guy that writes "one liners" in python.
I use awk (and python) daily at work. I work with a lot of flat files, and I use awk when I am doing data quality checks. One of the "sweet spots" it hits for me is when I need to group data by value, or other relatively simple aggregations.
For example, to print the first field of a line work the default delimiter could be accomplished in perl by running:
perl -ane 'print $F[0], "\n"'