Learning AWK Programming

Regular expressions as string-matching patterns with AWK

Regular expressions are used as string-matching patterns with AWK in the following three ways. We use the '~' and '! ~' match operators to perform regular expression comparisons:

• /regexpr/: This matches when the current input line contains a sub-string matched by regexpr. It is the most basic regular expression, which matches itself as a string or sub-string. For example, /mail/ matches only when the current input line contains the mail string as a string, a sub-string, or both. So, we will get lines with Gmail as well as Hotmail in the email ID field of the employee database as follows:

$ awk '/mail/' emp.dat

The output on execution of this code is as follows:

Jack Singh 9857532312 ...