This. It's often a good enough tool for solving problems that technically require a specialized tool. Except learning the specialized tool takes an order of magnitude more time than iterating on awk to get a good-enough solution.

I'm not proud to admit it, but I've used awk in a couple places where I should have properly used `expect' instead. Except, I don't know expect well and haven't gotten to the point where it was worth the investment in learning it.