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    awk is still very useful for manipulating data piped from other commands. For simple command line usage, I wouldn't consider it obsolete just yet. Commented Sep 25, 2010 at 21:57
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    Most 'advanced AWK' is probably better done with perl or python or whatever, but the simple stuff is nice to do with just awk. Commented Sep 28, 2010 at 14:12
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    Awk is still useful to know to understand various answers you might find online when trying to solve a problem. You will often find examples online that use awk statements like awk '{print $3}'. Commented Sep 28, 2010 at 15:30
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    I use awk quite frequently, both for manipulating text datafiles and to help create complex file manipulation commands in conjunction with "xargs". The equivalent Perl script typically takes longer to write unless the operation is too complex to readily to create via awk. Commented Dec 19, 2010 at 14:07
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    At work, and and home, I use awk more often then sed. Nothing can beat awk at fixed tabular data, like dpkg -l output. I wouldn't do anything remotely complicated in it, but I'd be short a tool without awk. I can't say the same for more general programming languages, as much as I like some of them. Commented Dec 31, 2011 at 4:22