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I dunno if it's a stepping stone or not. I think today most folks step up to Perl simply because more folks know Perl.

But I discovered AWK early, and it's still my hammer of choice, dropping in to Perl only for true edge cases that AWK simply doesn't work well.

I find it easier to work with than Perl, and for most of my work, the extra power and utility of Perl simply isn't necessary. I typically just need to do basic processing, and AWK is perfect for that.

It's not unheard of for me to pipe a couple of small AWK programs together with other shell utilities. Again, Perl could probably handle the entire task, but a combination of my familiarity with the classic Unix utilities, Perl's complexity, and AWKs simplicity all conspire to make me use the shell and AWK before I even think of using Perl. Typically, if I need Perl, I need to crack open a book/website. AWK and the shell I have, effectively, memorized.

I strongly suggest AWK to anyone. It's clever pattern -> action paradigm is quite simple, and really powerful.

And, as Aho said, it's just great for throw away programs. I have /tmp/x.awk almost permanently living on my disk, constantly being rewritten.

One of my common idioms is to edit a data file (in vi, of course), then :!vi /tmp/x.awk, create/edit a script, then ZZ back to my file, 1G!Gawk -f /tmp/x.awk to run the script on the buffer. If I don't like the changes, hit u to undo and edit the awk script again. Rinse and repeat.

It's a great tool.