See, when I'm writing a shell script interactively and work myself into a corner, I reach for awk, struggle with it for a bit, and then either:

1) succeed, and regret the messiness of the solution

or

2) fail, and find a non-awk way to handle it.

I really tried to like awk, but its portability hasn't been enough of a feature to raise it above other scripting languages for me. Especially if I'm going to end up in an editor