Spent about an hour and I see some useful commands that extend past what "cut" can do. But really when dealing with printf() format statements is anyone using awk scripts for this?
Or is everyone just using their familiar scripting language. I'd reach for Python for the problems being presented as useful for awk.
I use it multiple times a day. I only know basic usage, but it's super useful as part of an awk/grep/sort/uniq pipeline, basically just extracting a field to work on.