Awk

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Overview

awk handles a stream of text as a sequence of records. The default record separator is the new line, so by default each line is handled as a record. Each record is broken up into a sequence of fields. By default, the field separator is white space. An awk program consists in condition-action statements, that are applied to the records, as they are fed into awk. Each record is scanned for the condition, which can be a pattern, among other things, and for each condition that matches, the associated action is executed.

awk '<program>' <file>

The program is a succession of:

condition { action }

Example:

awk '{print $1}' ./sample.txt

For the above, the condition matches all records and the action prints out the first field.

Referring Fields

The fields are referred to with $<field-number> where field-number is 1-based: the first field in the record is $1.

Recipes