We have been able to build our skills with awk piece by piece and what we have learned has been useful. We can take these tiny steps and add them to start creating something a little more usable. Perhaps, we want to print just the standard users; these are usually users higher than 500 or 1000 depending on your particular distribution.

On the Raspbian distribution that I am using for this book, standard users start with UID 1000. The UID is the third field. This is really a simple matter of using the value of the third field as the range operator. We can see this in the following example:

$ awk -F":" '$3 > 999 ' /etc/passwd

We can show users with UID 101 with the following command:

$ awk -F":" '$3 < 101 ' /etc/passwd

These just give you an idea of some of the possibilities available with awk. The reality is that we can play all day with our arithmetic comparison operators.

We have also seen that with some of these examples, the awk statements become...