Tips for AWK

AWK Tutorial

1. For small structured text files, it is suggested that you use the q command to manipulate it.

   For complicated logic, it is suggested that you use a scripting language (e.g., Python) instead. I personally discourage using of awk unless you have a large file (that q cannot handle) and the operations you want do are simple.

2. Basic syntax of awk

    awk 'BEGIN {start_action} {action} END {stop_action}' file_name

3. Whether to user single or double quote depends on whether you use column variables in the expression. This is consistent with shell variable substitution.

4. awk ignorecase when working on files make unnecessary redundant output very annoying, not sure why

5. awk does not recognize escaped characters in CSV formatted. Make sure that the file awk works on is in simple format.

Field Delimiter¶

1. The delimiter must be quoted. For example, if the field delimiter is tab, you must use awk -F'\t' rather than awk -F\t.

2. The filed delimiter of AWK supports can be a regular expression.

    awk -F'[/=]' '{print $3 "\t" $5 "\t" $8}' file_name

Column/Field Filtering/Manipulation¶

1. Select 1st and 3rd column (seprated by tab)

    awk '{print $1 "\t" $3}' file_name

2. Sum of the 5th filed.

    awk 'BEGIN {s=0} {s=s+$5} END {print s}' file_name

Rows Filtering/Manipulation¶

1. Print rows of the file with the first field greater than 3.

    awk '{ if($1 > 3) print }' file_name

2. Print Docker image IDs that has no repositories names.

    docker images | awk '{ if ($1 == "<none>") print $3 }'

3. Print Docker image IDs whose name contains che using regular expression match.

    docker images | awk '{if ($1 ~ "che") print $3}'

4. Print rows with 2 fileds.

    awk 'NF == 2' file_name

   Or more verbosally (and more portable)

    awk 'NF == 2 {print} {}' file_name

5. Count the number of fields in each line.

    awk '{print NF}' file_name

References¶

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15386632/awk-4th-column-everything-matching-wildcard-before-the