I find myself being totally lost on the command line when I need to do more complex stuff - a series of pipes between greps and cuts and the works. Recently, I finally took some time to try to learn some awk and it was life changing. I’ve been doing some awk puzzles, but it occurred to me that if I’ll be deliberately spending time learning a command line text processing tool, I may as well go the extra mile and learn perl, which I’ve heard is far more expressive than gawk.

I’m also noticing a lack of literature on Perl on the command line, I.e “perl -nae <some script>”.

Is awk just better for this use case?