Code to do the same things is possible in perl, python, and other more full-featured scripting languages but not as terse. awk one liners are a staple of interacting with a unix/linux command prompt.

Conclusion awk and sed are indispensable tools in the Linux command-line toolbox, each with its strengths and ideal use cases. Whether you're performing quick text substitutions with sed or extracting ...

I should hope not. "Unix experience" implies you know how to get stuff done using tools common to most Unix-likes, like sed, grep and awk covered in this article.

and pipe the output to awk to do the replacement, but I don't think it is going to work. I can't get grep to do a multiline capture (can it even do that?) Is there a way to do it in awk in one shot?