Unix: Visual QuickStart Guide

Changing files with awk

While sed is line-oriented and lets you fiddle and diddle to your heart's content, awk is field-oriented and is ideal for manipulating database or comma-delimited files. For example, if you have an address book file, you can use awk to find and change information in fields you specify, as in Code Listing 6.11. In the following steps, we'll show you a sampling of the things you can do using awk to modify an address book file.

To change files with awk:

1.	awk '{ print $1 }' address. book At the shell prompt, use awk '{ print $1 }' address.book to look at the address.book file and select (and send to standard output) the first field in each record (line). More specifically, starting from the inside out: $1 references the ...