Shell Programming and Scripting

I count 5 pipes! You could enter the Useless Use of Cat Contest! (no offense!)
Useless Use of Cat Award

All that is possible in a awk one-liner with no piping. Can the OP provide sample file so that we can demonstrate the terseness of awk?

I offered the non-awk solution because it is self explanatory what it is doing and it uses commands that are used daily by most Unix users. The awk solution with no explanation what it is doing, for those like myself that are not familiar with awk, is just confusing. If parsing out IP addresses is an action that needs to be repeated often, I suggest using Perl, for two reasons. One, it is more efficient that shell solutions and two it is portable even to Windows systems so has a higher reuse value.

I agree that there is a tendency for awk coder to be as terse as possible but you can write awk code that is as readable as perl. Awk inspired Larry Wall to write Perl. So there is a little bit of awk philosophy and coding style in perl. And you can also obfuscate your code in perl:

Code:

#:: ::-| ::-| .-. :||-:: 0-| .-| ::||-| .:|-. :||
open(Q,$0);while(<Q>){if(/^#(.*)$/){for(split('-',$1)){$q=0;for(split){s/\|
/:.:/xg;s/:/../g;$Q=$_?length:$_;$q+=$q?$Q:$Q*20;}print chr($q);}}}print"\n";
#.: ::||-| .||-| :|||-| ::||-| ||-:: :|||-| .:|

Perl activity

I still believe that for this type of application (scanning a log file) awk is the best tool for the job. Portable, light and fast, very fast (specially the mawk version based on a byte code interpreter). You can also use awk on Linux, *bsd, windows and os-x platforms. Of course you can't do everything with awk. Although I have seen a http server written entirely in awk, when it comes to do complicated things you have to switch to a language like perl, php or python. But, again, for this type of problem, you can't beat awk.

So, if the OP can post a sample file, I promise to come up with a readable solution with comments. No obfuscated code anymore. Promised.