It was a creeping feature creature. The whole thing started off with the need to look for one particular phrase in a collection of log files, with timestamps but no date (date was encoded in the filename). So a Q&D awk script solved that. Then someone wanted to count the number of occurrences of arbitrary phrases in those log files. Then to use that info to calculate system capacity. Then to correlate that to times of day. Then to generate .csv files to import that into a spreadsheet so they can print out tables. But why import when awk can print tables directly? And if the data files are already available, why not generate charts directly from the data? This is how a one-liner became an entire framework of awk scripts. That was almost seven years ago, when I left to pursue another contract. Last I heard, they were still running them...