cite>These "trivial" AWK programs are presently beyond my ken.
Study AWK for a few hours and they will not be. Believe me: you need nowhere near 77 hours to be able to write such small programs that will save you those 77 hours of manual repetitive work... and much more in the future. In fact, reading Sections 1, 4 up to 4.5.1, 5.1, 5.6, 7.3, 7.4.1, 7.5.2 and 8.1.1 to 8.1.3 of https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/ is enough to understand in all details the two programs. More generally, reading Part I of that manual (without the section that describe "advanced features" and announced themselves as such) and practicing (testing modifications of the examples and so on) for a few hours is all you need to get an excellent level in AWK.
