Tutorial One

Awk, named after its developers Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan, is a programming language which permits easy manipulation of structured data and the generation of formatted reports.

The awk utility is a pattern scanning and processing language. It searches one or more files to see if they contain lines that match specified patterns and then perform associated actions , such as writing the line to the standard output or incrementing a counter each time it finds a match.

Some of the features of awk are:

• Its ability to view a text file as made up of records and fields in a textual database.
• Its use of variables to manipulate the database.
• Its use of arithmetic and string operators.
• Its use of common programming constructs such as loops and conditionals.
• Its ability to generate formatted reports.

The capabilities of awk extend the idea of text editing into computation, making it possible to perform a variety of data processing tasks, including analysis, extraction, and reporting of data. These are, indeed, the most common uses of awk.

The following list shows topics you may wish to browse to brush up on your awk skills :-

• Viewing a description of an awk program.
  
• Understanding what patterns and actions are?
  
• Learning what the awk command syntax is.
  
• Discovering how you comment an awk program.
  
• Seeing the in-built awk functions.
  
• Listing awk`s arithmetic operators.
  
• Using awk`s printf statement.