Explain Awk and Its Uses Like I'm Five

In short :

awk (also written as Awk and AWK) is a utility that enables a programmer to write tiny but effective programs in the form of statements that define text patterns that are to be searched for in each line of a document and the action that is to be taken when a match is found within a line. awk comes with most UNIX-based operating systems such as Linux, and also with some other operating systems, such as Windows 95/98/NT.

An awk program is made up of patterns and actions to be performed when a pattern match is found. awk scans input lines sequentially and examines each one to determine whether it contains a pattern matching one specified by the user. When the matching pattern is found, awk carries out the instructions in the program. For example, awk could scan text for a critical portion and reformat the text contained in it according to the user's command. If no pattern is specified, the program will carry out the command on all of the input data.

WHAT CAN WE DO WITH AWK ?

1. AWK Operations:
   (a) Scans a file line by line
   (b) Splits each input line into fields
   (c) Compares input line/fields to pattern
   (d) Performs action(s) on matched lines

2. Useful For:
   (a) Transform data files
   (b) Produce formatted reports

3. Programming Constructs:
   (a) Format output lines
   (b) Arithmetic and string operations
   (c) Conditionals and loops

for more detail like syntax and coding example

See these link about awk (linux awk command) hope these will be beneficial

hcs.harvard.edu/~dholland/computer...

computerhope.com/unix/uawk.htm

en.wikibooks.org/wiki/AWK

geeksforgeeks.org/awk-command-unix...

this one is a 3 min video : linkedin.com/learning/awk-essentia...

this one is pdf link :- cs.unibo.it/~renzo/doc/awk/nawkA4.pdf

choose which one you feel better these are the top links to learn .

Happy learning.

I had written an introduction to awk on dev.to :

Awk - A useful little language

Raunak Ramakrishnan ・ Jun 1 '18 ・ 3 min read

#shell #programming #bash #linux

code.snipcademy.com/tutorials/shel...