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AWK - Part 2 Cheat Sheet (DRAFT) by

This is a draft cheat sheet. It is a work in progress and is not finished yet.

Print lines that contain a specific field

Let take the file awk.txt as an example:
AWK is awesome
Let learn AWK together
AWK is used for text processing
We want to print lines that contain the word "­is":
 
awk '/is/ {print $0}' 
 >>> AWK is awesome 
 >>> AWK is used for text processing
What if we want to specify more than one field and print lines that contain the one of the these fields?
Let choose the fields "­is" and "­tex­t", and let print "­IS" before the line that contains the field "­is" and print "­TEX­T" before the line that contains the field "­tex­t". Let see the example:
 
awk '/is/ {print "­IS:­", $0} /text/ {print "­TEX­T:", $0}' awk.txt 
 >>> IS: AWK is awesome 
 >>> IS: AWK is used for text processing 
 >>> TEXT: AWK is used for text processing
Here we see that the last line was printed twice because it contains the two fields.

awk -f

The f flag specifies that the following argument is the name of a file that contains an AWK program. Let use the file "­com­man­d" as an example:
 
cat command 
 >>> {print $0}
We use f flag to tell AWK to execute this pogram on awk.txt and we get the following result:
 
awk -f command awk.txt 
 >>> AWK is awesome 
 >>> Let learn AWK together 
 >>> AWK is used for text processing
 

awk -F

The -F flag tell AWK to use the indicated argument as a field seperator. For example if we have fields separated by comma, then we need to specify the field separator.
 
awk -F , '{print $2}' 
 Yellow­,Bl­ue,Red 
 >>> Blue
We use 
t
for tab separator.
In this code 
awk -F '[,!]'
"­," and "­!" are fields sepera­tors.
In this code "­Hel­lo" is a field seperator 
awk -F Hello

awk -v

The -v flag is used to specify the value of an AWK variable:
 
awk -v T = "­Tut­ori­al:­" '{print T,$0}' awk.txt 
 >>> Tutorial: AWK is awesome 
 >>> Tutorial: Let learn AWK together 
 >>> Tutorial: AWK is used for text processing

awk Input

As we've already seen we can specify an input file for the awk command, but we can also specify more than one file at the same time :
 
awk '{print $0}' file1.txt file2.txt
We can also ommit the input file. In this case AWK will read from the input in the command line. We can use several inputs and then tape Ctrl+D to exit or (Ctrl+Z in Windows):
 
awk '{print $0}' 
 one two three 
 >>> two 
 Yellow Blue Red 
 >>> Blue
We can also specify the input from a file:
 
awk '{print $0} < file.txt
We can also take an input from a command with a vertical bar. Let try an example with the command 
date
:
 
date 
 >>> Thur Sept 12 11:12:05 CEST 2019 
 date | awk '{print $2}' 
 >>> Sept
 

awk Output

We can save the output in output.txt:
 
awk '{print $2}' awk.txt > out.txt
We can send the output to a program. Let use the command 
sort
to sort the output alphab­eti­cally:
 
awk '{print NF,$0}' awk.txt |sort 
 >>> AWK is awesome 
 >>> AWK is used for text processing 
 >>> Let learn AWK together