[rlonstein]

Whatever you think my opinion is of Perl you're probably wrong and the tone of your advocacy is kind of odd.

Awk is older and as a part of POSIX the version found on unix-like environments will be (outside of extensions) compatible with others. If one or one without the extensions you want isn't present you can choose an implementation, even one in Go and it'll work.

Perl, and I've been writing Perl since Perl4, doesn't have those characteristics. It's a much more powerful language that has changed over the years and it is not always present by default on a unix-like system. Because the maintainers value backward compatibility, even scripts written on Perl5.005 have a fair chance of working on a modern version but it's not assumed (and you shouldn't assume anything about modules). Because Awk is fossilized, you can assume that.

[Chris2048]

The first and last items in your list provide no reason why they are relevant, there is no "tone", nor "advocacy" - it's not "odd" to ask for that context, as given here.

[kazinator]

Awk is found in small-ish embedded systems that don't have no reason to waste space on Perl or anything like it.

One reason for this is that the popular BusyBox project includes an Awk implementation: BusyBox Awk.

Pretty much everywhere there is BusyBox, there is an Awk, unless someone went out of their way to compile it out of the BuxyBox binary.