The issue with Unix pipelines is that they handle arrays of structured data very poorly. Since everything is just a stream of bytes, non-trivial pipelines often need to shuffle data around to make the next stage happy because there is no standard (is it a tab, comma or space this time? newline or null byte?). For all its quirks, writing pipelines in PowerShell is usually far easier because they are a stream of objects and filters can directly work with property names, instead of fiddling with cut until everything is aligned properly.<p>I'll admit I've never used awk so my user experience of Unix pipelines is probably a bit worse than it has to be.