Book Image

Learning AWK Programming

By : Shiwang Kalkhanda
5 (1)
Book Image

Learning AWK Programming

5 (1)
By: Shiwang Kalkhanda

Overview of this book

AWK is one of the most primitive and powerful utilities which exists in all Unix and Unix-like distributions. It is used as a command-line utility when performing a basic text-processing operation, and as programming language when dealing with complex text-processing and mining tasks. With this book, you will have the required expertise to practice advanced AWK programming in real-life examples. The book starts off with an introduction to AWK essentials. You will then be introduced to regular expressions, AWK variables and constants, arrays and AWK functions and more. The book then delves deeper into more complex tasks, such as printing formatted output in AWK, control flow statements, GNU's implementation of AWK covering the advanced features of GNU AWK, such as network communication, debugging, and inter-process communication in the GAWK programming language which is not easily possible with AWK. By the end of this book, the reader will have worked on the practical implementation of text processing and pattern matching using AWK to perform routine tasks.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Getting Started with AWK Programming

Welcome to your journey with AWK programming. We all interact with data in our daily life in one way or another. Retrieving the desired, useful information from this data can seem like a difficult task, however, if we have the correct tools and proper knowledge of how to handle them, it's really not that difficult. This book will teach you how to efficiently handle one of the best of these tools, known as AWK. It is a standard feature of a Unix-like operating system to retrieve information from raw data. It will help you to understand trivial data-processing concepts in a user-friendly way.

This chapter is designed to give you a kickstart for writing your own simple AWK programs. Throughout the book, we will explain AWK, and work with useful and interesting examples to develop your problem-solving skills in AWK.


In this chapter, we will cover the following:

  • An overview of the AWK programming language
  • Different installation methods of AWK on the Linux environment
  • Understanding the AWK workflow
  • Learning how to create and run basic AWK programs in multiple ways
  • Working with sample data files with a simple usage of AWK
  • Understanding different AWK options