OSNews

What the hell? To quote what ESR said about Awk in "The Art of Unix Programming" ( http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch08s02.html#awk ):

{{{{{{{{{{
A case study of awk is included to point out that it is not a model for emulation; in fact, since 1990 it has largely fallen out of use. It has been superseded by new-school scripting languages—notably Perl, which was explicitly designed to be an awk killer. The reasons are worthy of examination, because they constitute a bit of a cautionary tale for minilanguage designers.

The awk language was originally designed to be a small, expressive special-purpose language for report generation. Unfortunately, it turns out to have been designed at a bad spot on the complexity-vs.-power curve. The action language is noncompact, but the pattern-driven framework it sits inside keeps it from being generally applicable — that's the worst of both worlds. And the new-school scripting languages can do anything awk can; their equivalent programs are usually just as readable, if not more so.
}}}}}}}}}}}

As someone who eats, lives and breathes Perl almost everyday, including for some "more serious" applications and APIs development, I find Awk to be incredibly limited, confusing, and kludgy. Perl is much more consistent, does not enforce awk's line-based coding (though it can be added using some http://perldoc.perl.org/perlrun.html command line flags), and is a serious programming. So I've noticed that I've been using variations on "perl -e" instead of Awk (and instead of sed) instead.

Awk knowledge is useful in understanding other people's old shell code, but it's a stupid and old language that falls between the chairs and should be put to sleep. Just do yourself a favour and use Perl or Ruby or whatever.