13. Practical awk Programs

A Library of awk Functions, presents the idea that reading programs in a language contributes to learning that language. This chapter continues that theme, presenting a potpourri of awk programs for your reading enjoyment. There are three sections. The first describes how to run the programs presented in this chapter.

The second presents awk versions of several common POSIX utilities. These are programs that you are hopefully already familiar with, and therefore, whose problems are understood. By reimplementing these programs in awk, you can focus on the awk-related aspects of solving the programming problem.

The third is a grab bag of interesting programs. These solve a number of different data-manipulation and management problems. Many of the programs are short, which emphasizes awk’s ability to do a lot in just a few lines of code.

Many of these programs use library functions presented in A Library of awk Functions.