A Princeton professor, finding a little time for himself in the summer academic lull, emailed an old friend a couple months ago. Brian Kernighan said hello, asked how their friend’s US visit was going ...

I use awk all the time, but generally only to conveniently pull a particular field out of data that I’m workin with. Regardless of the separator used, awk makes it easy to extract just what you need.

awk is a programming language optimized for text processing. It takes less code than sed or perl, where the input is field-based. bash and other interactive shells don't have the same capabilities ...

The awk utility is still one of the most useful tools for separating out columns within text, thus allowing them to be used in other commands. And GNU awk (gawk) with its wide range of new features ...

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