Question about awk commands

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

what does this mean?

cat /etc/passwd | awk -F: '{print $5}' | \
awk -F, '{print $1}' | \
awk '{print tolower($l)};{print tolower($2)}' | \
grep -v '^$' >> local_tmp

2

that means its a messily written code with a lot of redundant process and useless cat

awk -F":" '
{
   m=split($5,a,",")
   print tolower(a[1])
}
' /etc/passwd