Basics

Fundamentals

We'll refer to the language as AWK and to the executable that interprets AWK programs as awk or gawk.

Patterns and Actions

An AWK program is composed of pattern-action pairs

pattern1 { action1 }
pattern2 { action2 }
...

A pattern can be a regular expression pattern to match against the input. It can also be any expression that results in a true/false value.

An action is one or more AWK commands. The enclosing braces are required.

If the result of the pattern is true, then the corresponding action is evaluated.

Records and Fields

AWK parses the input as a series of records. Each record is split into zero or more fields.

The default behaviour is to:

• split the input into records using newline as the "record separator", so each line is a record.
• split the record into fields using whitespace as the "field separator", so each word is a field.

Patterns and Actions, continued

The pattern can be omitted, in which case the action is evaluated for every input record.

The action can be omitted, in which case the default action is to print the current record.

Special patterns

There are two special patterns that are often used.

• BEGIN will evaluate the associated action before any input is consumed.
• END will evaluate the associated action after all input is consumed.

Field variables

You refer to fields as $1, $2, $3, etc.

The current record is $0.

Here are some other frequently used builtin variables.

Builtin variables that control input parsing

• RS is the input record separator. As mentioned, its default value is a newline.
• FS is the input field separator.

These variable are often set in the BEGIN action block.

Builtin variables that convey information

These variables are automatically set by AWK during execution of the program.

• NF stores the number of fields in the current record.
  • To get the value of the last field, use $NF.
• NR stores the current record number.
  • When multiple input files are being processed, NR will hold the total number of records processed so far.
• FNR stores the current record number of the current input file.
  • To illustrate the difference between NR and FNR, here is a common AWK idiom.

    NR == FNR {action}
    

    This means "if the accumulated record number equals the record number of the current file." This can only be true for records in the first input file.

Truthiness

AWK uses the same concept of truthiness as C.

• The number 0 is false.
• Any other number is true.

Since AWK is a text-processing language, truth values are extended to strings.

• An empty string "" is false.
• Any non-empty string is true.

Comments

Comments start with the # character and extend to the end of the line.

Examples

On Unix-like systems /etc/passwd contains information about users. Each user is described on a separate line, with fields separated by colons.

To list the usernames:

awk '
    BEGIN { FS = ":" }
    { print $1 }
' /etc/passwd

Notice that the {print $1} action has no pattern, so it is executed for every record.

If we want to limit the output to only users who use bash as their login shell, we can do:

awk '
    BEGIN { FS = ":" }
    $7 == "/bin/bash" { print $1 }
' /etc/passwd