It’s arcane only if you don’t know C. If you’re on a UNIX-like or a true UNIX system, not knowing C will come to haunt you with a vengeance sooner or later.

> The best tool for the job sometimes is the tool you know best.

That's like hammering in screws because you know your hammer and screwdrivers seem arcane to you.

For ad-hoc stuff `ruby -e` is more than enough, and if you want to write a program once and use it a lot, it's worth investing the time in doing it the way it works best, which in this case, would be a (fast) language like awk that makes it easier to process line-by-line instead of reading until EOF and making the rest of the pipeline wait.