ARCHIVED: What is awk, and how do I use it?

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At Indiana University, you can use awk on all the Unix-based central systems. Although awk is a complete pattern scanning and processing language, it is most commonly used as a Unix command-line filter to reformat the output of other commands. For example, to print only the second and sixth fields of the date command (the month and year) with a space separating them, at the Unix prompt, you would enter:

 date | awk '{print $2 " " $6}'

To read the online manual (the man page) for awk, at the Unix prompt, enter:

 man awk

Also, consult the newsgroup comp.lang.awk.

gawk is a version of awk produced by the GNU Project. At IU, it is available on Quarry in the /usr/bin/gawk directory, and on the Research Database Complex (RDC) in the /opt/freeware/bin/gawk directory.

For information about gawk, at the Unix prompt, enter:

 man gawk

At Indiana University, for personal or departmental Linux or Unix systems support, see Get help for Linux or Unix at IU.

This is document afja in the Knowledge Base.
Last modified on 2018-01-18 10:00:50.