The awk command is incredibly useful, and you will be surprised at just how powerful and transformative it will make your scripts. Here’s how to get started using it. While I’m not a fan of ...

Awk does a lot more than select a column from a file or an input stream. It can select columns from selected rows. It can calculate totals, extract substrings, reverse the order of fields and provide ...

awk does a lot of common work for you when you use it to process text files. It reads files a record at a time. Normally, a record is a single line. Then it splits the line on fields using whitespace, ...

The awk command can make it easy to remove duplicate characters from a string even when those characters aren’t sequential, especially when the process is turned into a script. First, the awk command ...

As a relatively isolated junior sysadmin, I remember seeing answers on Experts Exchange and later Stack Exchange that baffled me. Authors and commenters might chain 10 commands together with pipes and ...

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that real programs can be and are written using the AWK programming language. When I first started working with UNIX, going back 10 years now, no one I ...

The awk programming language often gets overlooked for Perl, which is a more capable language. Out in the real world, however awk is found even more ubiquitously than Perl. It also has a smaller ...

We aren’t doing the next generation of Linux and Unix admins any favors by forgetting init scripts and fundamental tools I happened across a post on Reddit by chance, asking about textfile ...

A Princeton professor, finding a little time for himself in the summer academic lull, emailed an old friend a couple months ago. Brian Kernighan said hello, asked how their friend’s US visit was going ...