AWK Pocket Reference

AWK has lived in every Unix for nearly half a century. Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan built it at Bell Labs in 1977 to solve a permanent problem — structured text processing — with a minimal, composable design, and that design is why it endures. This pocket reference covers GNU AWK (gawk) with compatibility notes for macOS/BSD: records and fields, pattern–action programs, regular expressions, arrays, built-in and user-defined functions, output redirection and pipes, GNU extensions, debugging, locale, and the one-liners you will keep reaching for. Includes a cheat sheet, a quick reference card, and a task index for jobs you have not done yet but will.

Table of Contents

1. 1 The AWK Model
2. 2 Records and Fields
3. 3 Patterns
4. 4 Actions and Statements
5. 5 Variables and Expressions
6. 6 Regular Expressions
7. 7 Arrays
8. 8 Built-in Functions
9. 9 Output Redirection and Pipes
10. 10 AWK Programs in Files
11. 11 User-Defined Functions
12. 12 Error Handling and Defensive AWK
13. 13 Practical Recipes
14. 14 GNU AWK Extensions
15. 15 Debugging and Profiling
16. 16 Idioms and Patterns
17. 17 Locale and Encoding
18. 18 Gotchas and Edge Cases
19. 19 AWK vs Other Tools
20. 20 Cross-Platform Compatibility
21. A One-Liner Cheat Sheet
22. B Quick Reference Card
23. C Task Index