How I took it, was, that he used Unix native tools, using the Unix toolbox philosophy. There was a mildly complicated task, he picked out each piece and handled it as stages of a pipeline.
Yessir exactly the line I took.

On the other hand, as I read that description, and the fact it took 2 hours to come up with the solution, was that it took 1 hour and 45 minutes too long. Tweak tweak.
Err, yeah. I am just not as adept at handling incomprehensibly formatted data, as you are. Of course, when you think in an incomprehensibly formatted way, it does help reduce the time to fixit.

But compared with most non-Unix tool people, who would screw around with C or Basic or (name your non-scripting language of choice), they might take MANY hours munging through the data. So he did well.
The company actually asked me to evaluate the systems they have. Evidently many have tried to cleanup the data, this has been a problem for nearly 2 years since the "Programmer" they had, left to go live in the great outdoors in the mountains in a one-room cabin. About 200 miles from nowhere. He hated technology, and it shows in his work. I haven't seen any code or application or DB, but something tells me: "Clipper"