awk is a fantastic command line application that is useful for filtering, basic computations and transformations that other basic utilities (e.g. cut, sort, etc.) + grep don't (readily/easily) provide. I suppose it might be a bit archaic these days, but for someone familiar with it, it's often faster to compose an awk command than to write even a very quick/short script in, e.g., python or perl, for certain things.