awk Cheat Sheet

Tue, 26 Mar 2019 11:36:48 -0400

I needed to crunch some data quickly and decided awk was the right tool to do so. But every time I use awk, I have to go read the manual, so I decided it’s time for a cheat sheet.

Structure of an awk script

# Comments begin with a pound sign
BEGIN {
 # Instructions run before the main loop
 FS = ";" # Set a Field Separator
}

# Each line of input is applied against all the following
# regular expressions and runs the instructions in the
# block:

/^$/ { print "An empty line" }

END {
 # Instructions run after the main loop
}

Invoke awk with a script like so:

Cheat Sheet on ilikeorangutans

awk Cheat Sheet

Structure of an awk script