I work in HPC and mostly on the shell/console. Without a doubt, the combination of Bash (or another shell) and AWK is truly amazing. Being able to quickly generate statistics, filter out unnecessary information, generate pipelines, etc., is unmatched, and 99% of the time only requires a pipe redirect. Not to sound trendy, but using AWK really is the proverbial "if you know, you know".
One of my favorite use cases is based upon grep with extended regular expressions; there's always a need to search for strings while needing to exclude others, think of a basic example as "grep -E 'this|that' file |grep -Ev 'not(this|that)'". With AWK it's simple, "awk $0 ~ /(this|that)/ && $0 !~ /not(this|that)/' file". Or, if you're monitoring server load averages via a tool like sar, you can pick and choose which loads you want to monitor based upon a threshold, "uptime |awk '$10 ~ /[0-9]{3,}\.[0-9]{1,}/ || $12 ~ /[0-9]{3,}\.[0-9]{1,}/'". This will print matches if the 1 minute or 15 minute load averages are over 100.
Just because it's an "old" language doesn't mean it's obsolete or useless!
One of my favorite use cases is based upon grep with extended regular expressions; there's always a need to search for strings while needing to exclude others, think of a basic example as "grep -E 'this|that' file |grep -Ev 'not(this|that)'". With AWK it's simple, "awk $0 ~ /(this|that)/ && $0 !~ /not(this|that)/' file". Or, if you're monitoring server load averages via a tool like sar, you can pick and choose which loads you want to monitor based upon a threshold, "uptime |awk '$10 ~ /[0-9]{3,}\.[0-9]{1,}/ || $12 ~ /[0-9]{3,}\.[0-9]{1,}/'". This will print matches if the 1 minute or 15 minute load averages are over 100.
Just because it's an "old" language doesn't mean it's obsolete or useless!