Utility awk - Basics

The awk is a utility developed by Aho, Weinberger and Kerninghan (AWK). It is a pattern scanning and processing language.By default it reads from standard input and writes to standard output.

The awk programs can be used in two ways.

• Commandline
  awk 'pattern {print}' input_files awk '/regular expression/ {print}' input_files

• Program file
  awk -f awk_script input_file

Let's take below file for awk processing

File: myrecord

EMPID_001 SBAL C005 DEP_SALES

EMPID_002 GIRI C008 DEP_ENGG
EMPID_003 JAVV C001 DEP_HR
EMPID_004 SIKD C011 DEP_HR
EMPID_005 FARO C204 DEP_ENGG
EMPID_006 MABR C012 DEP_SALES

• a. Simple awk command to print the file

awk '{print}' myrecord
EMPID_001 SBAL C005 DEP_SALES
EMPID_002 GIRI C008 DEP_ENGG
EMPID_003 JAVV C001 DEP_HR
EMPID_004 SIKD C011 DEP_HR
EMPID_005 FARO C204 DEP_ENGG
EMPID_006 MABR C012 DEP_SALES

• b. Print employees in SALES

awk '/DEP_SALES/ {print}' myrecord
EMPID_001 SBAL C005 DEP_SALES
EMPID_006 MABR C012 DEP_SALES

• c. Print only empolyee names and their department (Splitting the fields)

awk '{print $2,$4}' myrecord
SBAL DEP_SALES
GIRI DEP_ENGG
JAVV DEP_HR
SIKD DEP_HR
FARO DEP_ENGG
MABR DEP_SALES

• d. Print the record with line numbers (NR: Print line numbers)

awk '{print NR,$0}' myrecord
1 EMPID_001 SBAL C005 DEP_SALES
2 EMPID_002 GIRI C008 DEP_ENGG
3 EMPID_003 JAVV C001 DEP_HR
4 EMPID_004 SIKD C011 DEP_HR
5 EMPID_005 FARO C204 DEP_ENGG
6 EMPID_006 MABR C012 DEP_SALES

awk '{print NR,$4}' myrecord
1 DEP_SALES
2 DEP_ENGG
3 DEP_HR
4 DEP_HR
5 DEP_ENGG
6 DEP_SALES

• e. Print the lines 4-6 from myrecord

awk 'NR==4, NR==6 {print NR,$0}' myrecord

4 EMPID_004 SIKD C011 DEP_HR
5 EMPID_005 FARO C204 DEP_ENGG
6 EMPID_006 MABR C012 DEP_SALES

• f. Print first field with line numbers

awk '{print NR "- " $1 }' myrecord
1- EMPID_001
2- EMPID_002
3- EMPID_003
4- EMPID_004
5- EMPID_005
6- EMPID_006

• g.Print only the last field (NF: Display Last Field)

awk '{print $NF}' myrecord
DEP_SALES
DEP_ENGG
DEP_HR
DEP_HR
DEP_ENGG
DEP_SALES