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, ...

The first command we’ll examine in this post is a very unusual awk command that systematically removes every line in the file that is encountered more than once. It leaves the first instance of the ...

The awk command can make it easy to remove duplicate characters from a string even when those characters aren’t sequential, especially when the process is turned into a script. First, the awk command ...

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that real programs can be and are written using the AWK programming language. When I first started working with UNIX, going back 10 years now, no one I ...

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 ...

As a relatively isolated junior sysadmin, I remember seeing answers on Experts Exchange and later Stack Exchange that baffled me. Authors and commenters might chain 10 commands together with pipes and ...

It is. I've converted a few machines here in just the last few months, even one where the HD was so shot full of holes only the recovery partition made it onto the replacement SSD and I wound up ...