I expect to need a portable way to pull text excerpts out of code output, either text reports or columnar or CSV numerical data files (aka "plotfiles"). Python could do it but that's way too much infrastructure, overhead, and fragility. Perl is possibly better but a bad precedent to set. That leaves sed and awk. I've had some success writing conplex sed scripts; I may need something more powerful but still lightweight so awk is looking surprisingly attractive.