plus, they exist in the vast majority of unix like systems. You don't have to install anything. They are just there and available to use. Even using them in a simplistic manner is light-years ahead of trying to do stuff manually.
I have moved on to structured data, awk and sed handle line oriented text formats.
Don't assume I don't know how to use it. :)
One line verses ten, I'll take the more readable thing over the APL.
Don't do that. Do not assume something is of no use because you don't know how to use it. Double that recommendation for tools that have widespread use. There is a reason they're used everywhere.
In the case of awk/sed/perl: Nothing beats them for composition in one-liner text processing pipelines.