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Systems & Data Center · Intermediate

awk

A Linux pattern-scanning and text-processing language that splits lines into fields for filtering and reporting.

Definition

awk treats each line as a record and whitespace-separated fields as $1, $2 and so on; -F sets the separator. It supports patterns, variables, arithmetic and printf-style output.

Example

awk -F: '$3 >= 1000 {print $1}' /etc/passwd lists regular user accounts.

Exam tip

Choose awk when you need to extract or compute on specific columns.

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