I learned perl around that time, and I thought it was awful. And just about everything about it: the parameter passing, the sigils that made BASIC look like Dijkstra's love child, the funky array/scalar coercion, and the bloody fact that it couldn't read from two files at once even though the docs suggested it should work. They didn't say so explicitly, because perl was pretty badly documented. My boss started writing object oriented perl, and that made perl unreadable even to perl experts.

AWK, on the other hand, is simplicity itself. Sure, it misses a few things, but for searching through log files or db dumps it's an excellent tool. And it's fast enough. If you really need much more speed, there are other tools, but I would rather rewrite it in C than try perl again.