Practical AWK - AWKwardly Dealing with Data

AWK is a text processing programming language developed at Bell Labs in the 1970s. It was originally used for data extraction and reporting. It inspired the creation of Perl and can, for the most part, be replaced by Python. It is still incredibly useful on the Linux command-line, both for one-liners or for short, powerful scripts.

Most people have used AWK in one way or another, but they use it without understanding the language. AWK syntax can seem strange. But once you understand that it is a data-driven pattern action language where the data is automatically parsed into predefined variables, it becomes a powerful and intuitive tool.

This talk seeks to take the mystery out of AWK by giving a quick introduction to the language and its features. There will be examples where it provides functionality that a dedicated utility like grep or cut or head might not. There will also be more complex examples where a few lines of AWK result in useful summarization of large amounts of raw data.

AWK is a great Swiss Army knife if you spend a lot of time on the command-line.