Usages of awk

Basic Understanding

The common template of using awk is like this: awk ' { actions } ' textFile.

Say I have a text file containing lines:

------ test.txt
hello world
heLLoWorld ha
London Paris
Changsha Wuhan
Beijing NewYork
Hell Nowhere

This command awk 'BEGIN{IGNORECASE=1} /^hel/ { print $2 }' test.txt emits result:

world
ha
Nowhere

So basically, awk just processes every line in the text file respectively and gives out the combined result.

How to Do Regular Expressions

According to the example above as well as the following one, you can easily get the point of doing regex with awk.

Let’s say we have a text file called test.txt whose content is as follows:

test 123
TEd show
Howday Tom
Hahahha
testing, take it easy

To grab every line where there is word “test”, try this: awk " /test/ { print } " test.txt. The part specifying the regular expression is /test/

How to do Conditionals

For example, awk ' { if ( $1 ~ /test/ ) print } ' test.txt will find out every line whose first column is word “test” (case-sensitive).

How to Specify Column Seperator

with -F option, you can denote the separator in place of white space, which is the default. Look at the example : awk -F, ' { print $1 } ' test.txt will print out the first column of each line separated by commas.

Please refer to GOOGLE SEARCH for more in-depth insights.

awk, bash, linux, shell — Feb 11, 2019