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awk - Text Processing
awk is a powerful text-processing language that is widely used in Unix-like operating systems, including Linux. Named after its three original developers - Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan, awk is adept at performing operations upon text files, such as sorting, filtering, and report generation.
The language comprises a set of commands within a script that define pattern-action pairs. Essentially, awk reads an input file line by line, identifies patterns that match what is specified in the script, and consequently executes actions upon those matches.
Though a complete language with variables, expressions, and control structures, awk is most commonly used as a single-line command within bash shell scripts, leveraging its versatile text manipulation capabilities.
Here’s an example of how to print first two fields of each line of a file using awk:
awk '{print $1,$2}' filename
This would display the first and second field (typically separated by spaces) of every line in filename.
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