AWK Process

AWK Process

• AWK Program is the serious of ‘pattern {action}’ statements.
• AWK Language Processor is the command itself(awk & nawk).
• Input/Output Streams are ASCII Text Records. The text can be treated as:
  • strings
  • numeric quantities
  • individual characters
  • fields

Output Stream

AWK Program

Input Stream

AWK Language Processor

(COMMAND)

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Awk works on a very simple concepts:

• BEGIN and END patterns must include an action statement.
• User Defined pattern {action} may have:
  • a pattern without an action; where the entire record is printed for the pattern matched.
  • no pattern with an action; where all records are processed as the pattern match defaults to a true condition.

Awk can be a very intimidating program to learn. However, once you understand the basic components of:

How to Start a Program
as a commandreading program from a program source file

as the program can be part of a command line or part of a script file.

Understand the functionality of pattern action statements such as:

BEGIN and END statementsUser Defined Pattern Actions