Introducing awk

awk is a pattern-scanning and text-processing utility that you can use to automate the process of creating reports and databases. With its built-in math functions, you can also use it to perform spreadsheet operations on text files of columnar, numerical data. The term awk comes from the names of its creators, Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan. The original version is now referred to as “old awk". Newer implementations, such as nawk and gawk, have more features and are somewhat easier to use.

The version of awk you have depends upon which operating system you’re running. Most Linux operating systems run gawk, which is the GNU implementation of awk. There’s most always an awk symbolic link that points to the gawk executable, as you see here on my Fedora workstation:

[donnie@fedora ~]$ awk --version
GNU Awk 5.1.1, API: 3.1 (GNU MPFR 4.1.1-p1, GNU MP 6.2.1)
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991-2021 Free Software Foundation.
This program is free software...