The stream editor is not alone in its family and has a big brother awk. In this chapter, we will run through the basics or fundamentals of awk and see the power of the awk programming language. We will learn why we need and love awk and how we can make use of some of the basic features before we start putting awk to practical use in the next two chapters. As we work our way through this, we will cover the following topics:
Filtering content from files
Formatting output
Displaying non-system users from
/etc/passwd
Using
awk
control files