Are you working in a Linux development environment? Targeting Linux systems? You're not going to come across much of a use for awk if you're in the Windows world. I'm making an assumption based on C#.

I've used perl and awk extensively for all sorts of things. Log parsing embedded device logs to generate reports was a big one for me, that's where I really learned both languages. And they are superb tools for that task. We also used awk quite a bit for configuration parsing as a sort of intermediary between different processes and scripts on those devices.

As I moved into web development, I've found myself using both much less. I haven't touched perl more than once in the last 6 years -- I was given a script to maintain recently but it only needed an hour or two of my time to add a small feature to. That perl script is part of a legacy build system. I still use awk every couple of months but it's just part of some pipeline on the command line.