Let's understand how the awk program processes every line. We will consider a simple file, sample.txt:
$ cat sample.txt
Happy Birth Day
We should live every day.
Let's consider the following awk command:
$ awk '{print $1, $3}' sample.txt
The following diagram shows how awk will process every line in memory:
An explanation of the preceding diagram is as follows:
- awk reads a line from the file and puts it into an internal variable called $0. Each line is called a record. By default, every line is terminated by a new line.
- Then, every record or line is divided into separate words or fields. Every word is stored in numbered ...
