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Programming with AWK

The document discusses the AWK programming language, highlighting its structure which includes a BEGIN block for initialization, a main code block for processing input lines, and an END block for final output. An example is provided to demonstrate how AWK counts occurrences of the word 'sheep' in a file. Additionally, it mentions that AWK scripts can be stored in files and executed using the '-f' option.

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0 views

Programming with AWK

The document discusses the AWK programming language, highlighting its structure which includes a BEGIN block for initialization, a main code block for processing input lines, and an END block for final output. An example is provided to demonstrate how AWK counts occurrences of the word 'sheep' in a file. Additionally, it mentions that AWK scripts can be stored in files and executed using the '-f' option.

Uploaded by

akym
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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"Managing Files Using Bash and Z Shell" course by Mateo Prigl at Pluralsight

Programming with AWK


AWK is a powerful simple interpreted programming language. It is usually
used to operate on lines, just like SED, but it is a full-blown programming
language. The AWK script has three parts. The first part is the code block which
starts with the BEGIN keyword. This block is executed before the AWK
command start processing the input, so it's mostly used for initialization. Then
we have the main code block which is executed on each line from the input.
You can actually have more then one, each prepended with a different
expression. Expression surrounded with slashes, can be placed before this code
block. If it is, than the operations inside of the block will be executed only on
these lines which match the expression.
Lastly we have the END block which is executed after AWK finishes processing
the lines from the input.
$ awk 'BEGIN{i=0; print "Counting sheep"} /sheep/ {i++;print i} END{print
"Finished"}' file

This example will first initialize a variable i to zero and then print "Counting
sheep". The middle code block will be executed on each line which contains the
word sheep. It will first increment the value inside of the i variable by one and
print it out. After everything is done, it will write out "Finished".
You can also write the programs inside of a file and invoke the scripts with the f
option.

1/1 © Copyright 2020 by Pluralsight

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