2. Getting Started with awk

The basic function of awk is to search files for lines (or other units of text) that contain certain patterns. When a line matches one of the patterns, awk performs specified actions on that line. awk keeps processing input lines in this way until the end of the input files are reached.

Programs in awk are different from programs in most other languages, because awk programs are data-driven; that is, you describe the data you wish to work with, and then what to do when you find it. Most other languages are procedural; you have to describe, in great detail, every step the program is to take. When working with procedural languages, it is usually much harder to clearly describe the data your program will process. For this reason, awk programs are often refreshingly easy to both write and read.

When you run awk, you specify an awk program that tells awk what to do. The program consists of a series of rules. (It may also contain function definitions, an advanced feature which we will ignore for now. See section User-defined Functions.) Each rule specifies one pattern to search for, and one action to perform when that pattern is found.

Syntactically, a rule consists of a pattern followed by an action. The action is enclosed in curly braces to separate it from the pattern. Rules are usually separated by newlines. Therefore, an awk program looks like this:

pattern { action } pattern { action } ...

2.1 A Rose By Any Other Name		What name to use to find awk.
2.2 How to Run awk Programs		How to run gawk programs; includes command line syntax.
2.3 A Very Simple Example		A very simple example.
2.4 An Example with Two Rules		A less simple one-line example with two rules.
2.5 A More Complex Example		A more complex example.
2.6 awk Statements Versus Lines		Subdividing or combining statements into lines.
2.7 Other Features of awk
2.8 When to Use awk		When to use gawk and when to use other things.

2.1 A Rose By Any Other Name

The awk language has evolved over the years. Full details are provided in The Evolution of the awk Language. The language described in this Info file is often referred to as "new awk."

Because of this, many systems have multiple versions of awk. Some systems have an awk utility that implements the original version of the awk language, and a nawk utility for the new version. Others have an oawk for the "old awk" language, and plain awk for the new one. Still others only have one version, usually the new one.(2)

All in all, this makes it difficult for you to know which version of awk you should run when writing your programs. The best advice we can give here is to check your local documentation. Look for awk, oawk, and nawk, as well as for gawk. Chances are, you will have some version of new awk on your system, and that is what you should use when running your programs. (Of course, if you're reading this Info file, chances are good that you have gawk!)

Throughout this Info file, whenever we refer to a language feature that should be available in any complete implementation of POSIX awk, we simply use the term awk. When referring to a feature that is specific to the GNU implementation, we use the term gawk.

2.2 How to Run awk Programs

There are several ways to run an awk program. If the program is short, it is easiest to include it in the command that runs awk, like this:

awk 'program' input-file1 input-file2 ...

where program consists of a series of patterns and actions, as described earlier. (The reason for the single quotes is described below, in One-shot Throw-away awk Programs.)

When the program is long, it is usually more convenient to put it in a file and run it with a command like this:

awk -f program-file input-file1 input-file2 ...

2.2.1 One-shot Throw-away awk Programs		Running a short throw-away awk program.
2.2.2 Running awk without Input Files		Using no input files (input from terminal instead).
2.2.3 Running Long Programs		Putting permanent awk programs in files.
2.2.4 Executable awk Programs		Making self-contained awk programs.
2.2.5 Comments in awk Programs		Adding documentation to gawk programs.

2.2.1 One-shot Throw-away awk Programs

Once you are familiar with awk, you will often type in simple programs the moment you want to use them. Then you can write the program as the first argument of the awk command, like this:

awk 'program' input-file1 input-file2 ...

where program consists of a series of patterns and actions, as described earlier.

This command format instructs the shell, or command interpreter, to start awk and use the program to process records in the input file(s). There are single quotes around program so that the shell doesn't interpret any awk characters as special shell characters. They also cause the shell to treat all of program as a single argument for awk and allow program to be more than one line long.

This format is also useful for running short or medium-sized awk programs from shell scripts, because it avoids the need for a separate file for the awk program. A self-contained shell script is more reliable since there are no other files to misplace.

Useful One Line Programs, presents several short, self-contained programs.

As an interesting side point, the command

awk '/foo/' files ...

is essentially the same as

egrep foo files ...

2.2.2 Running awk without Input Files

You can also run awk without any input files. If you type the command line:

awk 'program'

then awk applies the program to the standard input, which usually means whatever you type on the terminal. This continues until you indicate end-of-file by typing Control-d. (On other operating systems, the end-of-file character may be different. For example, on OS/2 and MS-DOS, it is Control-z.)

For example, the following program prints a friendly piece of advice (from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), to keep you from worrying about the complexities of computer programming (`BEGIN' is a feature we haven't discussed yet).

$ awk "BEGIN { print \"Don't Panic!\" }" -| Don't Panic!

This program does not read any input. The `\' before each of the inner double quotes is necessary because of the shell's quoting rules, in particular because it mixes both single quotes and double quotes.

This next simple awk program emulates the cat utility; it copies whatever you type at the keyboard to its standard output. (Why this works is explained shortly.)

$ awk '{ print }' Now is the time for all good men -| Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. -| to come to the aid of their country. Four score and seven years ago, ... -| Four score and seven years ago, ... What, me worry? -| What, me worry? Control-d

2.2.3 Running Long Programs

Sometimes your awk programs can be very long. In this case it is more convenient to put the program into a separate file. To tell awk to use that file for its program, you type:

awk -f source-file input-file1 input-file2 ...

The `-f' instructs the awk utility to get the awk program from the file source-file. Any file name can be used for source-file. For example, you could put the program:

BEGIN { print "Don't Panic!" }

into the file `advice'. Then this command:

awk -f advice

does the same thing as this one:

awk "BEGIN { print \"Don't Panic!\" }"

which was explained earlier (see section Running awk without Input Files). Note that you don't usually need single quotes around the file name that you specify with `-f', because most file names don't contain any of the shell's special characters. Notice that in `advice', the awk program did not have single quotes around it. The quotes are only needed for programs that are provided on the awk command line.

If you want to identify your awk program files clearly as such, you can add the extension `.awk' to the file name. This doesn't affect the execution of the awk program, but it does make "housekeeping" easier.

2.2.4 Executable awk Programs

Once you have learned awk, you may want to write self-contained awk scripts, using the `#!' script mechanism. You can do this on many Unix systems(3) (and someday on the GNU system).

For example, you could update the file `advice' to look like this:

#! /bin/awk -f BEGIN { print "Don't Panic!" }

After making this file executable (with the chmod utility), you can simply type `advice' at the shell, and the system will arrange to run awk(4) as if you had typed `awk -f advice'.

$ advice -| Don't Panic!

Self-contained awk scripts are useful when you want to write a program which users can invoke without their having to know that the program is written in awk.

Caution: You should not put more than one argument on the `#!' line after the path to awk. This will not work. The operating system treats the rest of the line as a single agument, and passes it to awk. Doing this will lead to confusing behavior: most likely a usage diagnostic of some sort from awk.

Some older systems do not support the `#!' mechanism. You can get a similar effect using a regular shell script. It would look something like this:

: The colon ensures execution by the standard shell. awk 'program' "$@"

Using this technique, it is vital to enclose the program in single quotes to protect it from interpretation by the shell. If you omit the quotes, only a shell wizard can predict the results.

The "$@" causes the shell to forward all the command line arguments to the awk program, without interpretation. The first line, which starts with a colon, is used so that this shell script will work even if invoked by a user who uses the C shell. (Not all older systems obey this convention, but many do.)

2.2.5 Comments in awk Programs

A comment is some text that is included in a program for the sake of human readers; it is not really part of the program. Comments can explain what the program does, and how it works. Nearly all programming languages have provisions for comments, because programs are typically hard to understand without their extra help.

In the awk language, a comment starts with the sharp sign character, `#', and continues to the end of the line. The `#' does not have to be the first character on the line. The awk language ignores the rest of a line following a sharp sign. For example, we could have put the following into `advice':

# This program prints a nice friendly message. It helps # keep novice users from being afraid of the computer. BEGIN { print "Don't Panic!" }

You can put comment lines into keyboard-composed throw-away awk programs also, but this usually isn't very useful; the purpose of a comment is to help you or another person understand the program at a later time.

Caution: As mentioned in One-shot Throw-away awk Programs, you can enclose small to medium programs in single quotes, in order to keep your shell scripts self-contained. When doing so, don't put an apostrophe (i.e., a single quote) into a comment (or anywhere else in your program). The shell will interpret the quote as the closing quote for the entire program. As a result, usually the shell will print a message about mismatched quotes, and if awk actually runs, it will probably print strange messages about syntax errors. For example:

awk 'BEGIN { print "hello" } # let's be cute'

2.3 A Very Simple Example

The following command runs a simple awk program that searches the input file `BBS-list' for the string of characters: `foo'. (A string of characters is usually called a string. The term string is perhaps based on similar usage in English, such as "a string of pearls," or, "a string of cars in a train.")

awk '/foo/ { print $0 }' BBS-list

When lines containing `foo' are found, they are printed, because `print $0' means print the current line. (Just `print' by itself means the same thing, so we could have written that instead.)

You will notice that slashes, `/', surround the string `foo' in the awk program. The slashes indicate that `foo' is a pattern to search for. This type of pattern is called a regular expression, and is covered in more detail later (see section Regular Expressions). The pattern is allowed to match parts of words. There are single-quotes around the awk program so that the shell won't interpret any of it as special shell characters.

Here is what this program prints:

$ awk '/foo/ { print $0 }' BBS-list -| fooey 555-1234 2400/1200/300 B -| foot 555-6699 1200/300 B -| macfoo 555-6480 1200/300 A -| sabafoo 555-2127 1200/300 C

In an awk rule, either the pattern or the action can be omitted, but not both. If the pattern is omitted, then the action is performed for every input line. If the action is omitted, the default action is to print all lines that match the pattern.

Thus, we could leave out the action (the print statement and the curly braces) in the above example, and the result would be the same: all lines matching the pattern `foo' would be printed. By comparison, omitting the print statement but retaining the curly braces makes an empty action that does nothing; then no lines would be printed.

2.4 An Example with Two Rules

The awk utility reads the input files one line at a time. For each line, awk tries the patterns of each of the rules. If several patterns match then several actions are run, in the order in which they appear in the awk program. If no patterns match, then no actions are run.

After processing all the rules (perhaps none) that match the line, awk reads the next line (however, see section The next Statement, and also see section The nextfile Statement). This continues until the end of the file is reached.

For example, the awk program:

/12/ { print $0 } /21/ { print $0 }

contains two rules. The first rule has the string `12' as the pattern and `print $0' as the action. The second rule has the string `21' as the pattern and also has `print $0' as the action. Each rule's action is enclosed in its own pair of braces.

This awk program prints every line that contains the string `12' or the string `21'. If a line contains both strings, it is printed twice, once by each rule.

This is what happens if we run this program on our two sample data files, `BBS-list' and `inventory-shipped', as shown here:

$ awk '/12/ { print $0 } > /21/ { print $0 }' BBS-list inventory-shipped -| aardvark 555-5553 1200/300 B -| alpo-net 555-3412 2400/1200/300 A -| barfly 555-7685 1200/300 A -| bites 555-1675 2400/1200/300 A -| core 555-2912 1200/300 C -| fooey 555-1234 2400/1200/300 B -| foot 555-6699 1200/300 B -| macfoo 555-6480 1200/300 A -| sdace 555-3430 2400/1200/300 A -| sabafoo 555-2127 1200/300 C -| sabafoo 555-2127 1200/300 C -| Jan 21 36 64 620 -| Apr 21 70 74 514

Note how the line in `BBS-list' beginning with `sabafoo' was printed twice, once for each rule.

2.5 A More Complex Example

Here is an example to give you an idea of what typical awk programs do. This example shows how awk can be used to summarize, select, and rearrange the output of another utility. It uses features that haven't been covered yet, so don't worry if you don't understand all the details.

ls -lg | awk '$6 == "Nov" { sum += $5 } END { print sum }'

This command prints the total number of bytes in all the files in the current directory that were last modified in November (of any year). (In the C shell you would need to type a semicolon and then a backslash at the end of the first line; in a POSIX-compliant shell, such as the Bourne shell or Bash, the GNU Bourne-Again shell, you can type the example as shown.)

The `ls -lg' part of this example is a system command that gives you a listing of the files in a directory, including file size and the date the file was last modified. Its output looks like this:

-rw-r--r-- 1 arnold user 1933 Nov 7 13:05 Makefile -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold user 10809 Nov 7 13:03 gawk.h -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold user 983 Apr 13 12:14 gawk.tab.h -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold user 31869 Jun 15 12:20 gawk.y -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold user 22414 Nov 7 13:03 gawk1.c -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold user 37455 Nov 7 13:03 gawk2.c -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold user 27511 Dec 9 13:07 gawk3.c -rw-r--r-- 1 arnold user 7989 Nov 7 13:03 gawk4.c

The first field contains read-write permissions, the second field contains the number of links to the file, and the third field identifies the owner of the file. The fourth field identifies the group of the file. The fifth field contains the size of the file in bytes. The sixth, seventh and eighth fields contain the month, day, and time, respectively, that the file was last modified. Finally, the ninth field contains the name of the file.

The `$6 == "Nov"' in our awk program is an expression that tests whether the sixth field of the output from `ls -lg' matches the string `Nov'. Each time a line has the string `Nov' for its sixth field, the action `sum += $5' is performed. This adds the fifth field (the file size) to the variable sum. As a result, when awk has finished reading all the input lines, sum is the sum of the sizes of files whose lines matched the pattern. (This works because awk variables are automatically initialized to zero.)

After the last line of output from ls has been processed, the END rule is executed, and the value of sum is printed. In this example, the value of sum would be 80600.

These more advanced awk techniques are covered in later sections (see section Overview of Actions). Before you can move on to more advanced awk programming, you have to know how awk interprets your input and displays your output. By manipulating fields and using print statements, you can produce some very useful and impressive looking reports.

2.6 awk Statements Versus Lines

Most often, each line in an awk program is a separate statement or separate rule, like this:

awk '/12/ { print $0 } /21/ { print $0 }' BBS-list inventory-shipped

However, gawk will ignore newlines after any of the following:

, { ? : || && do else

A newline at any other point is considered the end of the statement. (Splitting lines after `?' and `:' is a minor gawk extension. The `?' and `:' referred to here is the three operand conditional expression described in Conditional Expressions.)

If you would like to split a single statement into two lines at a point where a newline would terminate it, you can continue it by ending the first line with a backslash character, `\'. The backslash must be the final character on the line to be recognized as a continuation character. This is allowed absolutely anywhere in the statement, even in the middle of a string or regular expression. For example:

awk '/This regular expression is too long, so continue it\ on the next line/ { print $1 }'

We have generally not used backslash continuation in the sample programs in this Info file. Since in gawk there is no limit on the length of a line, it is never strictly necessary; it just makes programs more readable. For this same reason, as well as for clarity, we have kept most statements short in the sample programs presented throughout the Info file. Backslash continuation is most useful when your awk program is in a separate source file, instead of typed in on the command line. You should also note that many awk implementations are more particular about where you may use backslash continuation. For example, they may not allow you to split a string constant using backslash continuation. Thus, for maximal portability of your awk programs, it is best not to split your lines in the middle of a regular expression or a string.

Caution: backslash continuation does not work as described above with the C shell. Continuation with backslash works for awk programs in files, and also for one-shot programs provided you are using a POSIX-compliant shell, such as the Bourne shell or Bash, the GNU Bourne-Again shell. But the C shell (csh) behaves differently! There, you must use two backslashes in a row, followed by a newline. Note also that when using the C shell, every newline in your awk program must be escaped with a backslash. To illustrate:

% awk 'BEGIN { \ ? print \\ ? "hello, world" \ ? }' -| hello, world

Here, the `%' and `?' are the C shell's primary and secondary prompts, analogous to the standard shell's `$' and `>'.

awk is a line-oriented language. Each rule's action has to begin on the same line as the pattern. To have the pattern and action on separate lines, you must use backslash continuation--there is no other way.

Note that backslash continuation and comments do not mix. As soon as awk sees the `#' that starts a comment, it ignores everything on the rest of the line. For example:

$ gawk 'BEGIN { print "dont panic" # a friendly \ > BEGIN rule > }' error--> gawk: cmd. line:2: BEGIN rule error--> gawk: cmd. line:2: ^ parse error

Here, it looks like the backslash would continue the comment onto the next line. However, the backslash-newline combination is never even noticed, since it is "hidden" inside the comment. Thus, the `BEGIN' is noted as a syntax error.

When awk statements within one rule are short, you might want to put more than one of them on a line. You do this by separating the statements with a semicolon, `;'.

This also applies to the rules themselves. Thus, the previous program could have been written:

/12/ { print $0 } ; /21/ { print $0 }

Note: the requirement that rules on the same line must be separated with a semicolon was not in the original awk language; it was added for consistency with the treatment of statements within an action.

2.7 Other Features of awk

The awk language provides a number of predefined, or built-in variables, which your programs can use to get information from awk. There are other variables your program can set to control how awk processes your data.

In addition, awk provides a number of built-in functions for doing common computational and string related operations.

As we develop our presentation of the awk language, we introduce most of the variables and many of the functions. They are defined systematically in 10. Built-in Variables, and Built-in Functions.

2.8 When to Use awk

You might wonder how awk might be useful for you. Using utility programs, advanced patterns, field separators, arithmetic statements, and other selection criteria, you can produce much more complex output. The awk language is very useful for producing reports from large amounts of raw data, such as summarizing information from the output of other utility programs like ls. (See section A More Complex Example.)

Programs written with awk are usually much smaller than they would be in other languages. This makes awk programs easy to compose and use. Often, awk programs can be quickly composed at your terminal, used once, and thrown away. Since awk programs are interpreted, you can avoid the (usually lengthy) compilation part of the typical edit-compile-test-debug cycle of software development.

Complex programs have been written in awk, including a complete retargetable assembler for eight-bit microprocessors (see section D. Glossary, for more information) and a microcode assembler for a special purpose Prolog computer. However, awk's capabilities are strained by tasks of such complexity.

If you find yourself writing awk scripts of more than, say, a few hundred lines, you might consider using a different programming language. Emacs Lisp is a good choice if you need sophisticated string or pattern matching capabilities. The shell is also good at string and pattern matching; in addition, it allows powerful use of the system utilities. More conventional languages, such as C, C++, and Lisp, offer better facilities for system programming and for managing the complexity of large programs. Programs in these languages may require more lines of source code than the equivalent awk programs, but they are easier to maintain and usually run more efficiently.