UNIX: The Complete Reference, Second Edition, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 21awk and sed

The Swiss army knife of the UNIX System toolkit is awk. Many useful awk programs are only one line long, and in fact even a one-line awk program can be the equivalent of a regular UNIX System tool. For example, with a one-line awk program, you can count the number of lines in a file (like wc), print the first field in each line (like cut), print all lines that contain the phrase “open source” (like grep), or exchange the position of the third and fourth fields in each line (like join and paste). However, awk is a programming language with control structures, functions, and variables that allow you to write even more complex programs.

awk is specially designed for working with structured files and text patterns. It has built-in ...