Awk

awk(1p) is a scripting language designed for text processing.

Contents

Example

awk 'BEGIN { print "hello world" }'

A more realistic example is extracting hostnames from the hosts file.

awk '/^[^#]/ { print $2 }' /etc/hosts

Execute a script as:

awk -f my-hosts-parser.awk /etc/hosts

To make an awk(1p) script executable, use #! /bin/awk -f as the shebang line.

awk(1p) will be installed on all Linux or BSD distributions.

There are several implementations, some of which are available on additional platforms.