I love chaining commands as much as anyone, and sed, awk, grep, and perl are some of my best friends. However, remember that, in *nix, each command runs in its own process, the resources required for ...

The awk command can make it easy to remove duplicate characters from a string even when those characters aren’t sequential, especially when the process is turned into a script. First, the awk command ...

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that real programs can be and are written using the AWK programming language. When I first started working with UNIX, going back 10 years now, no one I ...

The first command we’ll examine in this post is a very unusual awk command that systematically removes every line in the file that is encountered more than once. It leaves the first instance of the ...

awk does a lot of common work for you when you use it to process text files. It reads files a record at a time. Normally, a record is a single line. Then it splits the line on fields using whitespace, ...

Many years ago, probably close to 20, a regular point was made on the comp Usenet newsgroups about using the minimum tool to get the job done. That is, someone would ask for a quick and dirty way to ...

Wow. It’s amazing we ever made it out of the 20th century. It’s like reading about farmers who would plow by hand. I remember the epiphany (long time ago) of discovering how awk solved my problem of ...