Understanding AWK

I have a confession to make: I don’t know how to use Awk. Or at least I didn’t know how to use it before I started writing this article. I would hear people mention Awk and how often they used it, and I was pretty certain I was missing out on some minor superpower.

Like this little off hand comment by Bryan Cantrill:

I write three or four Awk programs a day. And these are one-liners. These super quick programs.

It turns out Awk is pretty simple. It has only a couple of conventions and only a small amount of syntax. As a result, it’s straightforward to learn, and once you understand it, it will come in handy more often than you’d think.

Read in full here:

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