Text processing with awk

awk is a very powerful tool you can use in Linux to analyze and process text. In fact, awk is not like any command you have learned so far, and that’s because awk is actually a programming language. You will find books that are solely written to explain and discuss the use of awk. However, I am only going to show you the very basics of awk here, and you can dig further on your own.

You can use awk to achieve the same functionality as the cut command. For example, to view the first word of each line in the file facts.txt, you can run:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ awk '{print $1}' facts.txt 
Apples
Grapes 
Bananas 
Cherries 
Cloud 
Earth 
Linux 
Cherries 
Cherries 
Cherries 
Grass 
Swimming

Notice we didn’t need to specify the space character ' ' as a delimiter as we did with the cut command and that’s because awk is smart enough to figure it out on its own. You can also view more than one field at a time; for example, to view the first and...