But awk is usually part of the default system install, unlike Lua. And while GNU awk isn't as common, it's still far more likely to be available than Lua, especially on Linux systems. (Though, per elsethread, it shouldn't be too difficult to port to POSIX awk, or the superset of "portable" awk.)
The odds of finding a linux system without perl5 on it are pretty slim. How much do you hate yourself? Is it enough to want to implement a JVM in perl.... :D
