panel 1:

awk is a tiny programming language for manipulating columns of data

person: I only know how to do 2 things with awk but it’s still useful!

panel 2: basic awk program structure

BEGIN {...}  
CONDITION (action}  
CONDITION (action}

(do action on lines matching CONDITION)

END {...}

panel 3: extract a column.of text with awk

awk -F, '{print $5}'
the comma is the column separator
the ’ is a single quote!
{print $5} means print the 5th column

person: this is 99% of what I do with awk

panel 4:

SO MANY Unix commands print columns of text (ps! Is!)

so being able to get the column you want with awk is GREAT

panel 5: awk program example

sum the numbers in the 3rd column

{s += $3}; (action)
END {print s}' (at the end, print the sum!)

panel 6: awk program example

print every line over 80 characters
length($0) > 80
“length” is the condition

(there’s an implicit {print} as the action)