Studying and awk came up.
Spent about an hour and I see some useful commands that extend past what “cut” can do. But really when dealing with printf() format statements is anyone using awk scripts for this?
Or is everyone just using their familiar scripting language. I’d reach for Python for the problems being presented as useful for awk.
awk is awesome! I love it, and I do not regret learning how to use it.
That said, my workflow invariably always shifts from starting with awk to do something simply with a tiny one-liner, to then doing that with perl or python, and sometimes even creating a file to make the by-now multi-line scripts more easily readable.
I do not recommend starting with awk, if you do not know other languages already such as Python.
In short, let your intuition guide you.