Always had CSV support, it's called `awk --field-separator=","`.
The problem is commas inside quoted strings, as in the example "Smith, Bob".
I believe the field-separator option on awk will break the quoted string at the interior comma.
awk -F'"' -v OFS='' '{ for (i=2; i<=NF; i+=2) gsub(",", "", $i) } 1' infile
1. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/48672/remove-comma-...