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 ...

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, ...

I love chaining commands as much as anyone, and sed, awk, grep, and perl are some of my best friends. However, remember that, in *nix, each command runs in its own process, the resources required for ...

Awk does a lot more than select a column from a file or an input stream. It can select columns from selected rows. It can calculate totals, extract substrings, reverse the order of fields and provide ...

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 ...

Many years ago, probably close to 20, a regular point was made on the comp Usenet newsgroups about using the minimum tool to get the job done. That is, someone would ask for a quick and dirty way to ...

Wow. It’s amazing we ever made it out of the 20th century. It’s like reading about farmers who would plow by hand. I remember the epiphany (long time ago) of discovering how awk solved my problem of ...