Even after decades of using Unix on thousands of systems, I find that it’s still fun to discover various convolutions of sed and awk commands to perform command line wizardry. There’s a lot more to ...

awk does a lot of common work for you when you use it to process text files. It reads files a record at a time. Normally, a record is a single line. Then it splits the line on fields using whitespace, ...

Awk does a lot more than select a column from a file or an input stream. It can select columns from selected rows. It can calculate totals, extract substrings, reverse the order of fields and provide ...

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that real programs can be and are written using the AWK programming language. When I first started working with UNIX, going back 10 years now, no one I ...

In an earlier article ("GNU Awk 4.0: Teaching an Old Bird Some New Tricks", published in the September 2011 issue of Linux Journal), I gave a brief history of awk and gawk and provided a high-level ...

As a relatively isolated junior sysadmin, I remember seeing answers on Experts Exchange and later Stack Exchange that baffled me. Authors and commenters might chain 10 commands together with pipes and ...

A Princeton professor, finding a little time for himself in the summer academic lull, emailed an old friend a couple months ago. Brian Kernighan said hello, asked how their friend’s US visit was going ...

awk is a programming language optimized for text processing. It takes less code than sed or perl, where the input is field-based. bash and other interactive shells don't have the same capabilities ...