Gawk Examples
Some very simple examples of gawk usage (copied and pasted from the gawk infopages, info gawk for more info):
* Print the length of the longest input line:
awk '{ if (length($0) > max) max = length($0) }
END { print max }' data
* Print every line that is longer than 80 characters:
awk 'length($0) > 80' data
The sole rule has a relational expression as its pattern and it
has no action--so the default action, printing the record, is used.
* Print the length of the longest line in `data':
expand data | awk '{ if (x < length()) x = length() }
END { print "maximum line length is " x }'
The input is processed by the `expand' utility to change tabs into
spaces, so the widths compared are actually the right-margin
columns.
* Print every line that has at least one field:
awk 'NF > 0' data
This is an easy way to delete blank lines from a file (or rather,
to create a new file similar to the old file but from which the
blank lines have been removed).
* Print seven random numbers from 0 to 100, inclusive:
awk 'BEGIN { for (i = 1; i <= 7; i++)
print int(101 * rand()) }'
* Print the total number of bytes used by FILES:
ls -l FILES | awk '{ x += $5 }
END { print "total bytes: " x }'
* Print the total number of kilobytes used by FILES:
ls -l FILES | awk '{ x += $5 }
END { print "total K-bytes: " (x + 1023)/1024 }'
* Print a sorted list of the login names of all users:
awk -F: '{ print $1 }' /etc/passwd | sort
* Count the lines in a file:
awk 'END { print NR }' data
* Print the even-numbered lines in the data file:
awk 'NR % 2 == 0' data
If you use the expression `NR % 2 == 1' instead, the program would
print the odd-numbered lines.