Engineering Clinic

AWK Awk is abbreviated from the names of the developers – Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan . Awk is a scripting language used for manipulating data and generating reports. The awk command programming language requires no compiling and allows the user to use variables, numeric functions, string functions, and logical operators. AWK is one of the most prominent text-processing utilities on GNU/Linux. It is very powerful and uses a simple programming language. Awk is a utility that enables a programmer to write tiny but effective programs in the form of statements that define text patterns that are to be searched for in each line of a document and the action that is to be taken when a match is found within a line. 1. AWK Operations: (a) Scans a file line by line (b) Splits each input line into fields (c) Compares input line/fields to pattern (d) Performs action(s) on matched lines 2. AWK Useful For: (a) Transform data files (b) Produce formatted reports Syntax: $ awk options 'selection