Awk is a versatile programming language designed for pattern scanning and processing language and often used as a data extraction and reporting tool. It’s an excellent filter and report writer. It’s a standard feature of most Unix-like operating systems.
Awk is small, fast, simple, and has a clean comprehensible C-like input language. It has robust programming constructs including if/else, while, do/while and for C-style and array iteration.
The name awk comes from the initials of its designers: Alfred V. Aho, Peter J. Weinberger, and Brian W. Kernighan. The original version of awk was written in 1977 at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
The language is suited for:
- Tallying information from text files and creating reports from the results.
- Adding additional functions to text editors like “vi”.
- Translating files from one format to another.
- Creating small databases.
- Performing mathematical operations on files of numeric data.
Here’s our recommended tutorials to learn Awk. If you’re looking for free Awk programming books, check here.
1. Awk – A Tutorial and Introduction by Bruce Barnett
Awk is an extremely versatile programming language for working on files. We’ll teach you just enough to understand the examples in this page, plus a smidgen.
2. Getting Started With AWK Command by Sylvain Leroux
Here are 25 AWK command examples that will help you master the basics of AWK.
3. Why you should learn just a little Awk: An Awk tutorial by Example
This article aims to teach you the most useful stuff – not the “fundamentals”, but the 5 minutes worth of practical stuff that will get you most of this language.
4. Steve’s Awk Academy by Steve Litt
Steve’s Awk Academy offers a good introduction to the power of Awk.
All tutorials in this series:
Free Programming Tutorials | |
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