awk command examples
Create the file addresses with the following content.
Ramesh Shetty, 34, 4th Cross, Kuvempu Nagar, Mysore KA
Sureshi Bendre, 56, 3rd Main, T Nagar, Chennai TN
John Simon, 24, 5th Main, Jaya Nagar, Bangalore KA
G H Shinde, 56, 6th Main, Bandra, Mumbai MH
S Manjrekar, 39, 8th Main, Chanakya Puri ND
P K Reddy, 67, 9th Main, Charminar, Hyderabad AP
Syntax for awk command
awk 'instructions' files
- Instructions must be enclosed in single quotes
- Instructions always contain curly brackets and dollar signs
- Each line of the file is considered a record
- Each word is considered a field
- $1, $2, $3 …. represent first, second, and third words in a line
- $0 represents the full line
To print the first word in each line
awk '{ print $1}' addresses
Here, space(s) is considered the separator. For awk, spaces and/or tabs are
the default separators. However, this can be changes as shown below.
Print the first word only if it meets a condition
awk '/KA/ { print $1 }' addresses
This prints the first word of the lines which contain the phrase KA.
To print the name in each address
To do this, we need to print till the first comma. That means, we should
instruct awk to consider comma as the separator. Remember that the default
separator is space and/or tab.
awk -F, '{ print $1 }' addresses
awk -F, '/MA/ { print $1 }' addresses
Here -F, changes the separator from space to comma.
Rearranging the data using awk
awk -F, '{ print $1; print $2; print $3; print $4; print $5 }' addresses