As others have noted, awk is great for one-liners. Just minutes ago, I wanted to find out what users and groups own all of the files within a certain deep directory tree (on linux). I did this:

$ ls -lR | awk '{ print $3, $4 }' | sort -u > user_group_list

and got the list I wanted. (Yes, it's sloppy but I don't care, as it's just a one-off.)