awk — Field Processing & Reporting

Field processing and reporting with awk across 12 disciplines. Each discipline is a directory — add sub-pages as it grows without restructuring. 48 concern partials, all commands copy-paste-runnable on Arch Linux.

Disciplines

Discipline Description Partials

Basics

Field extraction, built-in variables, line selection, head/tail emulation

3

Patterns

Regex matching, field conditions, conditionals, range patterns, state machines

3

Aggregation

Frequency counts, column sums, group-by, min/max/avg, standard deviation

3

Formatting

printf specifiers, BEGIN/END reports, output separators, paragraph mode

3

Strings

String functions, substitution, regex match extraction, gsub/sub

3

Arrays

Associative arrays, multi-dimensional, PROCINFO sorting, lookup tables

3

Multi-File

FNR/NR idioms, file joins, set operations, lookups, diffs

3

Infrastructure

System admin, certificates, user/group parsing, process analysis

4

Network

ss parsing, IPv4/IPv6 extraction, ARP/VLAN, tcpdump summaries

5

Logs

Auth logs, syslog/journalctl, nginx/apache, multi-log correlation

4

Gotchas

Shell quoting traps, numeric comparison, ERE regex limits, printf vs print

3

Mathematics

Arithmetic → sequences → quadratics → linear algebra → calculus → probability → geometry

12

See Also

  • grep — pattern matching (awk’s filter counterpart)

  • sed — line-level transforms (where awk operates on fields)

  • xargs — act on awk output

  • Regex Patterns — cross-tool regex reference