Kevin Taylor

History of AWK Initially developed in 1977 Created in AT&T Bell Labs Named after its developers Standard on UNIX/Linux systems Three main branches

What is it? Procedural, data-driven scripting language Syntax similar to bash and Perl Quick video!

Versions of AWK AWK ( 1977) New awk, or nawk (1985) GNU awk, or gawk (1986) Awk++

What can AWK do for you Strong text manipulator Can easily find files/records Can create automated records Good at generating HTML

What it can't do Not good at manipulating binary data Not well suited for parsing HTML Not a web programming language

AWK use today AWK is available on almost all UNIX/Linux systems AWK itself is seldom used GAWK is the most popular version Normally not a go-to language

How to use it UNIX/Linux/Mac OS X – already installed Windows – install Cygwin (its free!) Some websites are able to run AWK scripts Many online tutorials

What AWK did AWK was a major influence to Larry Wall (Perl) AWK: #!/usr/bin/awk -f BEGIN { print “Hello world!” } Perl: #!/usr/bin/perl print “Hello world!\n”;

Built-in variables AWK has many built-in variables All that were in AWK transferred to nawk/gawk One of the most common is “FS” – Field Separator Use to parse files “-F” in command line works the same

FS Question One Two:Three:4 Five #!/bin/awk -f { print $2 FS=":" }

Questions?