I've always found it awkward when complex shell commands involve parsing text output with awkAWK. Basically we're converting structured data into text, then parsing the text again to get back at the structured data.
PowershellPowerShell is a Windows shell which avoids that problem by allowing you to pipe typed objects between shell commands instead of just text.
Are there any Unix shells which are object-based instead of text-based, like PowershellPowerShell?