Really not a fan of awk. It really looks nice but I have inherited a lot of it in the past and know how many foot guns there are. Trashing the unix philosophy of using text as a communication protocol, I've seen terrible terrible mistakes when it comes to repetitive re-parsing stuff at each pipe step.

The finest was a 3rd party who accidentally added a space in a data feed. This was dutifully sucked out of their SFTP server via a bash script, pre-processed using awk into the standard internal format and then picked up by a cron job which ran a python script to inject it into postgres. The outcome was of course that the columns were offset by 1. This caused a huge asset valuation dip and some market alarm.

A proper parser would have rejected the whole dataset as the data row could not be parsed.