Ooof. I have to respectfully disagree that perl deprecates awk. If I'm writing awk, it's usually because what I want to do is precisely what awk does by default: read a line, match it against a condition, and perform some action.

I could do all that in perl, but it's more stuff I'd need to dig up every time I wanted to do something awk-like. People who code perl regularly already have it, for sure. It's a barrier for those of us who don't, and one that awk doesn't have.

Awk isn't perfect, for sure, but I've transitioned from writing simple text processing in perl to doing it in awk because awk provides the basic framework that I'd end up doing ad-hoc and non-idiomatically in perl every time.

Again, all this with that caveat that I'm not a perl programmer. I used it for a couple of semesters in college, which was enough to be dangerous, but not truly proficient.