I just checked the fundraiser , we already surpassed the 2 . 5 million mark but the new goal is at 4 . 5 million now , wtf ? <| sep |> I use awk daily and sed from time to time . They ' re cool , but the awk you are really gonna use can be picked up in an hour , you don ' t need any book . If you arebecome an oldishschool unix programmer , connecting different small programs that read and write streams of plain text . then , yeah , awk is fantastic and it is worth it to really grok it , but in any other case you don ' t need that . For instanceTo print the first column of something gawk ' print $ 2 ' Then , if you want to get all the modified files in a git repository it outputs lines like modified srclolwtf . bbq git status grep modified gawk ' print $ 2 ' Use F to specify the separator between columns spaces by default and you ' re halfway there .