Practically everything you can do in AWK can be done just as easily and quickly in Perl. And Perl absolutely wins when you need to do that one extra thing that AWK really just can't do.
And I say this as a person who switched over from Perl to Python eons ago.
Whatever things I couldn’t do in sh or Awk, I would do in C.
Seriously, Perl is an okay language for quick and dirty things of a tiny/small size. Yeah, it's not the best language for a large development project, but if you do need to parse /etc/passwd or something, not only it's perfectly good as-is, but you'll certainly find something on CPAN that already does it well.
I can't imagine why would one want to do that kind of thing in C. It's just unnecessarily painful, and you'll spend 90% of the time on doing things that don't solve the actual task you need to be solved.
Yeah, in modern times it's gone way downhill, but that's mostly if you intend to do something big with it. I wouldn't use it to start a new, fully featured CMS. But for sysadmin type stuff as an alternative to sh/awk it's still just as usable as ever.
That said, I have to revise my original comment. I forgot that I was a big fan of Tcl/Tk/Expect back in the day. So it's not like my taste is better than anyone else's :)
You could also use
BEGIN {
FS = “: “
}
Anyway, cool blog. I'm reading it.