Transcript Slides

Kevin Taylor
History of AWK

Initially developed in 1977
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Created in AT&T Bell Labs
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Named after its developers
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Standard on UNIX/Linux systems
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Three main branches
What is it?
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Procedural, data-driven scripting language
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Syntax similar to bash and Perl
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Quick video!
Versions of AWK
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AWK ( 1977)
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New awk, or nawk (1985)
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GNU awk, or gawk (1986)
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Awk++
What can AWK do for you
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Strong text manipulator
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Can easily find files/records
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Can create automated records
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Good at generating HTML
What it can't do
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Not good at manipulating binary data
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Not well suited for parsing HTML
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Not a web programming language
AWK use today
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AWK is available on almost all UNIX/Linux
systems
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AWK itself is seldom used
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GAWK is the most popular version
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Normally not a go-to language
How to use it
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UNIX/Linux/Mac OS X – already installed
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Windows – install Cygwin (its free!)
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Some websites are able to run AWK scripts
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Many online tutorials
What AWK did
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AWK was a major influence to Larry Wall (Perl)
AWK:
#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN { print “Hello world!” }
Perl:
#!/usr/bin/perl
print “Hello world!\n”;
Built-in variables
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AWK has many built-in variables
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All that were in AWK transferred to nawk/gawk
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One of the most common is “FS” – Field Separator
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Use to parse files
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“-F” in command line works the same
FS Question
One Two:Three:4 Five
#!/bin/awk -f
{
print $2
FS=":"
print $2
}
Questions?