An Unknown DBA blog: awk Tutorial -- 0 -- Introduction

awk is a very powerful Unix/Linux command which I have been using extensively in some scripts I have been sharing with the community. I have been asked a lot about writing an awk tutorial, many seeing how powerful this command is; this is it. Note that this tutorial is not a "everything you can do with awk" tutorial but more of a "quickly become efficient with awk" kind of tutorial.

This tutorial is meant for beginners who want to learn awk to be more efficient in their day to day work. Following through this tutorial will seriously increase your awk skills. I will use real files like /etc/passwd, outputs of ls or outputs of ps as examples through this tutorial then everyone can easily replicate the examples. I will also try to keep each section short; one section per feature.

Before jumping into it; you may be interesed by the below information on awk:

awk by one of its creator: Brian Kernighan: very nice Brian Kernighan and Lex Fridman 7 minute conversation about awk
The history of awk: a short history of awk
The complete awk documentation: more as a definitive reference to go further than this tutorial

Below the list of sections already covered which I will be adding as I write them: