What is awk?

Question

Give an example of how you use it

Answer 1

I'm from Pennsylvania Dutch country. Awk means, at least in their useage, " Oh come on now" . Awk naw !

Answer 2

Awk is a programming language designed to make many common information retrieval and text manipulation tasks easy to state and to perform. The basic operation of awk is to scan a set of input lines in order, searching for lines which match any of a set of patterns which the user has specified. For each pattern, an action can be specified; this action will be performed on each line that matches the pattern.

It is VERY useful when writing shell scripts for working with files on UNIX systems.

For example, the awk program

awk '{print $2,$1}' filename

will print the second field, then the first. All other fields are ignored.

Answer 3

awk (also written as Awk and AWK) is a utility that enables a programmer to write tiny but effective programs in the form of statements that define text patterns that are to be searched for in each line of a document and the action that is to be taken when a match is found within a line. awk comes with most Unix-based operating systems such as Linux, and also with some other operating systems, such as Windows 95/98/NT.

from: http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid26_gci214557,00.html

As for examples, check my reference link.

Answer 4

Simple answer - pattern scan text processin language.
It is a lovely little (but big) tool for processing data, text retrival, data manipulation, etc. most unix/linux will come wtih it. If you want to know more get a book or search on the web