Awk Tutorial

This tutorial takes you through all about AWK, one of the most prominent text-processing utility on GNU/Linux. Similar to many other GNU/Linux utilities, it is very powerful and uses simple programming language. It is capable of solving complex text processing tasks with few lines of code. This easy, yet powerful utility makes GNU/Linux more interesting.

Audience

If you are a software developer, system administrator, or a GNU/Linux loving person, then this tutorial is for you.

Prerequisites

You must have basic understanding of GNU/Linux operating system and shell scripting.


AWK is an interpreted programming language. It is very powerful and specially designed for the text processing. AWK name is derived from the family names of its authors – Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan.
GNU/Linux distributes the version of the AWK which is written and maintained by the Free Software Foundation(FSF) and often referred as GNU AWK. Following are the variants of the AWK.

• AWK - this is original AWK from AT & T Laboratory.
• NAWK - this is newer and improved version of AWK from AT & T Laboratory.
• GAWK - this is GNU AWK. All GNU/Linux distributions ship GAWK and is fully compatible with AWK and NAWK.

Typical uses of AWK

Myriad of tasks can be done with AWK. Following are just few of them:

• Text processing,
• Produce formatted text reports,
• Perform arithmetic operations,
• Perform string operations, and many more.