Hour 17. Filtering Text with awk

In Chapter 16, “Filtering Text with Regular Expressions,” you learned how to use regular expressions with sed to filter text. In this chapter, you will look at another powerful text filtering program called awk.

awk is a program and a complete programming language that enables you to search many files for patterns and to conditionally modify files without having to worry about opening files, reading lines, or closing files. It's found on all UNIX systems and is quite fast, easy to learn, and extremely flexible. This chapter concentrates on the awk elements that are most commonly used in shell scripts, specifically:

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