The AWK Programming Language, 2nd Edition

2

Awk in Action

Awk is useful for creating small tools and personal scripts that help you to automate repetitive tasks or to deal with some weirdly specific computation that you care about but no one else does.

In this chapter we’re going to look at a number of examples. These specific programs may not be directly useful to you (though with luck a few will be), but they might give you ideas about programs that you could write yourself, or techniques that you could apply in your own programming.

The chapter is organized around simple computations, and the basic operations of selection, transformation, and summarization that Awk was originally designed for. Each of the examples is meant to be of intrinsic interest or utility, to show something ...