Awk

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

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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

Shebang

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

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Installation

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

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

• Brian Kernighan open-sourced the original Unix implementation

• GNU awk (or gawk) is an extended implementation

• BusyBox

• GoAWK

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Syntax

• Patterns

• Actions

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See also

awk(1p)

GNU awk user manual

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