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 ...

I use awk all the time, but generally only to conveniently pull a particular field out of data that I’m workin with. Regardless of the separator used, awk makes it easy to extract just what you need.

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, ...

In an earlier article ("GNU Awk 4.0: Teaching an Old Bird Some New Tricks", published in the September 2011 issue of Linux Journal), I gave a brief history of awk and gawk and provided a high-level ...

The awk programming language often gets overlooked for Perl, which is a more capable language. Out in the real world, however awk is found even more ubiquitously than Perl. It also has a smaller ...