awk Command: Tutorial & Examples

Perform text processing and data manipulation tasks

The awk command is a utility that is used to perform text processing and data manipulation tasks on Linux systems. It is a powerful tool that is often used to extract specific information from text files or command output, or to perform operations on data fields within those files or output.

awk works by reading input line by line, applying a set of rules or operations to each line, and then printing the result. The rules or operations are specified using a programming language that is similar to C, and can include things like string manipulation, arithmetic calculations, and conditional statements.

Here is a simple example of using awk to extract the third field from a file that contains tab-separated values:

awk -F'\t' '{print $3}' file.txt

This will print the third field (column) of each line in the file. The -F'\t' flag specifies that the fields in the file are separated by tabs.

You can also use awk to perform arithmetic operations on fields or variables:

awk '{print $1 * $2}' file.txt

This will multiply the first and second fields (columns) of each line in the file and print the result.

awk is a very powerful and flexible tool for text processing and data manipulation on Linux systems. It is often used in scripts and other automation tasks to extract specific information from text files.