The awk command is incredibly useful, and you will be surprised at just how powerful and transformative it will make your scripts. Here’s how to get started using it. While I’m not a fan of ...

The awk command can make it easy to remove duplicate characters from a string even when those characters aren’t sequential, especially when the process is turned into a script. First, the awk command ...

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 ...

The awk command is a versatile text-processing tool in Linux. It filters and manipulates files using patterns, conditions, and actions. It supports a wide range of scenarios, making it straightforward ...

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, ...

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 ...

The moment you chain 7 commands including awk or write a shell script with many subroutines is time to consider a "real" language like perl or python, or even c/c++/java. File operations are a bit ...

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 ...

The awk programming language often gets overlooked for Perl, which is a more capable language. Out in the real world, however awk is found even more ubiquitously than Perl. It also has a smaller ...