It has options to split up input into fields and loop over every line for one-liners, yeah. For a trivial example,

    awk '{ print $2 }' foo.txt

becomes

    perl -lane 'print $F[1]' foo.txt

I'm one of those people who out off learning awk for a decade+ because I knew perl, but when I finally picked it up I found it's often simpler and cleaner. I still switch to perl for complicated processing but awk can get a lot done.