For values of serious work. Dedicated embedded devices may still run 32 bit CPUs. Much SOHO network kit has ridiculously small storage and memory (8 MB flash, 64 MB RAM), making memory-intensive operations, such as, say, deduplicating a 250,000 item spam and malware domains blocklist, challenging.
These also have awk, almost always via Busybox, though using OpenWRT other versions are installable.
BusyBox v1.28.4 () built-in shell (ash)
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|__| W I R E L E S S F R E E D O M
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OpenWrt 18.06.2, r7676-cddd7b4c77
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root@modem:~# uname -a
Linux modem 4.9.152 #0 SMP Wed Jan 30 12:21:02 2019 mips GNU/Linux
root@modem:~# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 59136 38484 20652 1312 2520 13096
-/+ buffers/cache: 22868 36268
Swap: 0 0 0
root@modem:~# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 2560 2560 0 100% /rom
tmpfs 29568 1268 28300 4% /tmp
tmpfs 29568 44 29524 0% /tmp/root
tmpfs 512 0 512 0% /dev
/dev/mtdblock5 3520 1772 1748 50% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay 3520 1772 1748 50% /
root@modem:~# which awk
/usr/bin/awk
root@modem:~# ls -l `which awk`
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Jan 30 12:21 /usr/bin/awk -> ../../bin/busybox
root@modem:~# opkg list | grep awk
gawk - 4.2.0-2 - GNU awk
root@modem:~#
... though in this case, adblock runs on a larger and more capable Turris Omnia (8 GB flash, 2 GB RAM). The hourly sort still shows up on system load average plots.
The Turris does just fine. It's equivalent, mostly, to a mid-oughts desktop.
The flexibility of keeping the adblock processing self-contained, rather than processing this on another box and rigging an update mechanism, is appealing.
The 'huge" file is 6MB. That's not immense, but it taxes (overly constrained, IMO) typical SOH router resources.
The flexibility afforded, for pennies to a few dollars, of, say, > 1 GB storage and 500 MB RAM, is tremendous.
I'm not sure what Busybox's sort does, though on an earlier iteration on a mid-oughts Linksys WRT54g router running dd-wrt, sorting was infeasible. I hadn't tried the awk trick.
It did have a Busybox awk though, which proved useful.
These also have awk, almost always via Busybox, though using OpenWRT other versions are installable.
... though in this case, adblock runs on a larger and more capable Turris Omnia (8 GB flash, 2 GB RAM). The hourly sort still shows up on system load average plots.