Benthos is a really cool tool when you want to take this idea to the next level. It can do the usual text/csv/json/yaml mangling you'd do with awk or jq (since it includes a version of those in addition to its own processing langauge) but it also has decoders and encoders for a bunch of different binary formats like protobuf or Avro. And in addition to stdin/out and files it can talk to Kafka, MQTT, HTTP, ES and a bunch of other stuff. I was able to put together a log processor that consumes from Kafka, does a bunch of field mangling and then ingests into Elasticsearch in a couple dozen lines of yaml.