1. Kevin Taylor

2. 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

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

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

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

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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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”;

10. 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

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

12. Questions?