Better use of awk, sed, and grep

[mlafeldt]

I had a quick look at some parts of the code and saw a few things that can be improved:

• put multiple sed commands into a single invocation
• use sed instead of grep & cut
• utilize awk's built-in features (the range trick is described at http://www.catonmat.net/blog/ten-awk-tips-tricks-and-pitfalls/#awk_ranges)

I'm sure we could tweak the commands further, but this is a start.