Awk: The Text Processing Beast

Awk is a domain-specific language designed for text processing and typically used as a data extraction and reporting tool.

Basic Syntax

awk 'pattern { action }' file

Print the first column of a file:

awk '{print $1}' data.txt

By default, Awk splits by whitespace. Use -F to specify a different delimiter, like a comma for CSVs: awk -F, ...