If you are like many computer users, you would frequently like to make changes in various text files wherever certain patterns appear, or extract data from parts of certain lines while discarding the rest. To write a program to do this in a language such as C or Pascal is a time-consuming inconvenience that may take many lines of code. The job is easy with awk, especially the GNU implementation: gawk.
The awk utility interprets a special-purpose programming language that makes it possible to handle simple data-reformatting jobs with just a few lines of code.
The source code for GNU awk is available from the GNU project's ftp server.
The gawk manual is available online.
A separate manual for the special TCP/IP networking features of GNU awk is also available online: gawkinet.
Bug reports for gawk should be sent to the gawk bug report mailing list.
Please send FSF & GNU inquiries & questions to gnu@gnu.org. There are also other ways to contact the FSF.
Please send comments on these web pages to webmasters@www.gnu.org, send other questions to gnu@gnu.org.
Copyright (C) 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111, USA
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
Updated: $Date: 2004/08/31 22:19:54 $ $Author: karl $