Awk

Awk is a small but capable programming language which is used for processing text. It was developed by Aho, Weinberger, Kerninghan at Bell Labs. Julia Evans made an awesome Awk comic: Awk scans input file as a sequence of lines and splits each line into fields. The field separator is usually whitespace but you can customize it to any character. An awk program is a sequence of pattern-action pairs i.e for each line, it checks if it matches the pattern and if yes, it performs the associated action on the line. Awk can be used interactively or to run saved programs. Here is what Awk does written in Python-like pseudocode: initialize() # Initializes variables in BEGIN block for line in input_lines: # Awk divides file / input into a list of lines for condition, action in conditions: # A program is a list of condition-action pairs if condition(line): #match line against condition action() #perform action on match Here are some small snippets of Awk: Example - Hello World! You can run awk programs inline or through a file: ...