Awk does a lot more than select a column from a file or an input stream. It can select columns from selected rows. It can calculate totals, extract substrings, reverse the order of fields and provide ...

The awk command is incredibly useful, and you will be surprised at just how powerful and transformative it will make your scripts. Here’s how to get started using it. While I’m not a fan of ...

A Princeton professor, finding a little time for himself in the summer academic lull, emailed an old friend a couple months ago. Brian Kernighan said hello, asked how their friend’s US visit was going ...

We aren’t doing the next generation of Linux and Unix admins any favors by forgetting init scripts and fundamental tools I happened across a post on Reddit by chance, asking about textfile ...

Even after decades of using Unix on thousands of systems, I find that it’s still fun to discover various convolutions of sed and awk commands to perform command line wizardry. There’s a lot more to ...

awk does a lot of common work for you when you use it to process text files. It reads files a record at a time. Normally, a record is a single line. Then it splits the line on fields using whitespace, ...

If you use Windows today and type ls, cat, grep, or awk in a terminal, there is a good chance something useful will happen. That was not always true. For most of the history of personal computing, ...