Awk

The Awk programming language is a scripting language for operating on text files. It is self-described as being a "data driven" tool; "you describe the data you want to work with and then what to do when you find it".

There are several implementation of awk(1), the most widely-used being GNU awk (or gawk). Brian Kernighan open-sourced the original Unix awk. BusyBox includes an implementation of POSIX awk. There are several revival/modernization projects, notably GoAWK which supports CSV as an input and output format.

See the User Manual for more upstream information.

Example

A hello world program isn't helpful for awk, but here's an example anyway.

awk 'BEGIN { print "hello world" }'

A better example would involve parsing a hosts file.

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

The awk syntax can be written to a script file and executed like:

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

Shebang

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

Syntax

• Patterns

• Actions

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