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AWK

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This reference is written for a semi-knowledgeable UNIX user who has just come up against a problem and has been advised to use awk to solve it. For more information about awk, see An Awk Primer.

Versions

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There are the following major versions of awk:

  • awk or Bell Labs awk
  • nawk or new awk
  • gawk (GNU awk)
  • mawk

Both nawk and gawk will run awk programs without modification.

Getting AWK: If you are on Linux or macOS, you already have AWK. For MS Windows, a version of GNU awk is available from ezwinports, GnuWin32 project, and Cygwin.

Introduction

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Awk reads from a file or from its standard input, and outputs to its standard output. You will generally want to redirect that into a file, but that is not done in these examples just because it takes up space. awk does not get along with non-text files, like executables and FrameMaker files. If you need to edit those, use a binary editor like hexl-mode in emacs.

A frustrating thing about trying to learn awk is getting your program past the shell's parser. The proper way is to use single quotes around the program, like so: 

>awk '{print $0}' filename

The single quotes protect almost everything from the shell. In csh or tcsh, you still have to watch out for exclamation marks, but other than that, you're safe.

Another frustrating thing about trying to learn awk is the lovely error messages: 

awk '{print $0,}' filename
awk: syntax error near line 1
awk: illegal statement near line 1

gawk generally has better error messages. At least it tells you where in the line something went wrong: 

gawk '{print $0,}' filename
gawk: cmd. line:1: {print $0,}
gawk: cmd. line:1:           ^ parse error

So, if you're having problems getting awk syntax correct, switch to gawk for a while.

Some basics

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  • Awk recognizes the concepts of "file", "record", and "field".
  • A file consists of records, which by default are the lines of the file. One line becomes one record.
  • Awk operates on one record at a time.
  • A record consists of fields, which by default are separated by any number of spaces or tabs.
  • Field number 1 is accessed with $1, field 2 with $2, and so forth. $0 refers to the whole record.

Some examples

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Perhaps the quickest way of learning awk is to look at some sample programs. The one above will print the file in its entirety, just like cat(1). Here are some others, along with a quick description of what they do. 

>awk '{print $2,$1}' filename

will print the second field, then the first. All other fields are ignored. 

>awk '{print $1,$2,sin($3/$2)}' filename

will print the first and second fields, and then the sine of the third field divided by the second. So, the second and third field had better be numbers. Awk has other built in math functions like sine; read the manpage to see which ones.

"I still say awk '{print $1}' a lot."
the inventor of PERL, Larry Wall (lwall@netlabs.com)

What if you don't want to apply the program to each line of the file? Say, for example, that you only wanted to process lines that had the first field greater than the second. The following program will do that: 

>awk '$1 > $2 {print $1,$2,$1-$2}' filename

The part outside the curly braces is called the "pattern", and the part inside is the "action". The comparison operators include the ones from C: 

== != < > <= >= ?:

If no pattern is given, then the action applies to all lines. This fact was used in the sample programs above. If no action is given, then the entire line is printed. If "print" is used all by itself, the entire line is printed. Thus, the following are equivalent: 

awk '$1 > $2'           filename
awk '$1 > $2{print}'    filename
awk '$1 > $2{print $0}' filename

The various fields in a line can also be treated as strings instead of numbers. To compare a field to a string, use the following method: 

> awk '$1=="foo"{print $2}' filename

Regular expressions

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What if you want lines in which a certain string is found? Just put a regular expression (in the manner of egrep(1) ) into the pattern, like so: 

>awk '/foo.*bar/{print $1,$3}' filename

This will print all lines containing the word "foo" and then later the word "bar". If you want only those lines where "foo" occurs in the second field, use the ~ ("contains") operator: 

>awk '$2~/foo/{print $3,$1}' filename

If you want lines where "foo" does not occur in the second field, use the negated ~ operator, !~ 

>awk '$2!~/foo/{print $3,$1}' filename

This operator can be read as "does not contain".

Booleans

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You can produce complicated patterns with the boolean operators from C, which are ! for "not", && for "and", and || for "or". Parentheses can be used for grouping.

Start and End

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There are three special forms of patterns that do not fit the above descriptions. One is the start-end pair of regular expressions. For example, to print all lines between and including lines that contained "foo" and "bar", you would use 

>awk '/foo/,/bar/' filename

Begin and End

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The other two special forms are similar; they are the BEGIN and END patterns. Any action associated with the BEGIN pattern will happen before any line-by-line processing is done. Actions with the END pattern will happen after all lines are processed.

But how do you put more than one pattern-action pair into an awk program? There are several choices. One is to just mash them together, like so: 

 > awk 'BEGIN{print"fee"} $1=="foo"{print"fi"}
        END{print"fo fum"}' filename

Another choice is to put the program into a file, like so: 

BEGIN{print"fee"}
$1=="foo"{print"fi"}
END{print"fo fum"}

Let's say that's in the file giant.awk. Now, run it using the "-f" flag to awk: 

> awk -f giant.awk filename

A third choice is to create a file that calls awk all by itself. The following form will do the trick: 

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN{print"fee"}
$1=="foo"{print"fi"}
END{print"fo fum"}

If we call this file giant2.awk, we can run it by first giving it execute permissions, 

> chmod u+x giant2.awk

and then just call it like so: 

> ./giant2.awk filename

awk has variables that can be either real numbers or strings. For example, the following code prints a running total of the fifth column: 

> awk '{print x+=$5,$0 }' filename

This can be used when looking at file sizes from an "ls -l". It is also useful for balancing one's checkbook, if the amount of the check is kept in one column.

Variables

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awk variables are initialized to either zero or the empty string the first time they are used. Which one depends on how they are used, of course.

Variables are also useful for keeping intermediate values. This example also introduces the use of semicolons for separating statements: 

 > awk '{d=($2-($1-4));s=($2+$1);print d/sqrt(s),d*d/s }' filename

Note that the final statement, a "print" in this case, does not need a semicolon. It doesn't hurt to put it in, though.

  • Integer variables can be used to refer to fields. If one field contains information about which other field is important, this script will print only the important field:
 > awk '{imp=$1; print $imp }' filename
  • The special variable NF tells you how many fields are in this record. This script prints the first and last field from each record, regardless of how many fields there are:
 > awk '{print $1, $NF}' filename
  • The special variable NR tells you which record this is. It is incremented each time a new record is read in. This gives a simple way of adding line numbers to a file:
 > awk '{print NR, $0}' filename

Of course, there are a myriad of other ways to put line numbers on a file using the various UNIX utilities. This is left as an exercise for the reader.

  • The special variable FS (Field Separator) determines how awk will split up each record into fields. This variable can be set on the command line. For example, /etc/passwd has its fields separated by colons.
 > awk -F: '{print $1,$3 }' /etc/passwd
This variable can actually be set to any regular expression, in the manner of egrep(1).

The various fields are also variables, and you can assign things to them. If you wanted to delete the 10th field from each line, you could do it by printing fields 1 through 9, and then from 11 on using a for-loop (see below). But, this will do it very easily: 

 > awk '{$10=""; print }' filename

In many ways, awk is like C. The "for", "while", "do-while", and "if" constructs all exist. Statements can be grouped with curly braces. This script will print each field of each record on its own line. 

 > awk '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) print $i }' filename

If you want to produce format that is a little better formatted than the "print" statement gives you, you can use "printf" just like in C. Here is an example that treats the first field as a string, and then does some numeric stuff 

 > awk '{printf("%s %03d %02d %.15g\n",$1,$2,$3,$3/$2); }' filename

With printf, you need the explicit newline character.

We can use "printf" to print stuff without the newline, which is useful for printing record fields in reverse order, one record per line: 

 > awk '{for(i=NF;i > 0;i--) printf("%s",$i); printf("\n"); }' filename

Associative arrays

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awk has associative arrays, indexed by strings. It has no direct analogue of arrays from the C language. String-indexed associative arrays are useful in their own right, but making them work as normal arrays is cumbersome.

For example, we can count the frequency of words in a document (ignoring the icky part about printing them out): 

> awk '{for(i=1;i <=NF;i++) freq[$i]++ }' filename

The array will hold an integer value for each word that occurred in the file. Unfortunately, this treats "foo", "Foo", and "foo," as different words. Oh well. How do we print out these frequencies? awk has a special "for" construct that loops over the values in an array. This script is longer than most command lines, so it will be expressed as an executable script: 

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
{for(i=1;i <=NF;i++) freq[$i]++ }
END{for(word in freq) print word, freq[word]  }

This loop-over-an-array seems to go in no particular order. Thus, the output from a program like this must often be piped through sort(1) in order to be useful.

Multi-dimensional arrays are implemented in an odd way. The given indices are concatenated together (with a special separator) to get one string, and it is used as the index. This program will print the word-pair frequencies: 

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
{for(i=1;i < NF;i++) freq[$i,$(i+1)]++ }
END{for(words in freq) print words, freq[words]  }

Unfortunately, this will print out the separator, which is by default not a common character. You can change this by assigning something logical like a space to the variable SUBSEP using nawk or gawk (it's not allowed in plain awk). 

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN{SUBSEP=""}
{for(i=1;i < NF;i++) freq[$i,$(i+1)]++}
END{for(words in freq) print words, freq[words] }

Unfortunately, this doesn't let you refer to the indices individually. The secret to this it to use the "split" function, which breaks a string up into an array. 

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN{SUBSEP="" }
{for(i=1;i < NF;i++) freq[$i,$(i+1)]++}
END{ for(words in freq)
     {
        split(words,word,SUBSEP); 
        print word[1], freq[words],word[2];
     } 
   }

Links:

Sorting

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Normal awk does not have any built-in functions to sort arrays. However, gawk has asort (sort by values) and asorti (sort by indices AKA keys) functions. asort loses the original indices, replacing them with 1 to length indices.

Links:

Code from a file

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When you're using an awk script in a file, you can break your program across multiple lines to make it easier to read. Comments are started the same way as in sh programming, with a # 

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
# this program prints the frequencies of word pairs
BEGIN{SUBSEP=""} # set the index separator 
                 # to a nice character
{for(i=1;i < NF;i++) freq[$i,$(i+1)]++}
END{ for(words in freq)
     {
# just to show we can put a comment in here.
       split(words,word,SUBSEP); # or here
       print word[1], freq[words],word[2];
     } 
}

You can use awk to create text, as well as just process existing text. It is useful for quickly generating tables of function values, without the hassle of compiling a C program. For example, it can show that sin(x)/x approaches 1 as x approaches zero: 

> awk '{x=1.0/NR; print x,sin(x)/x;}'

will print a new value each time it reads a new line. So, you can hit return until you have all the values you need. Alternately, if you need a set number of values, you can do 

> awk 'BEGIN{for(i=1;i <=30;i++){x=1.0/i;print x,sin(x)/x;}}' /dev/null

where 30 is the set number of values.

Punctuation

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  • {} : used around the action, and to group statements in the action.
  • $ : denotes a field. $1 is the first field, $0 is the whole record.
  • ~ : the "contains" operator. "foobar"~"foo" is true. Strings only.
  • !~ : the "does not contain" operator. Strings only.
  • == : the equality operator. Works for numbers or strings
  • < > <= >= != : inequality operators. Work for numbers or strings.
  • # : the begin-comment character
  • , : separates things in a "print" or "printf" statement.
  • ; : separates statements.
  • // : used around a regular expression
  • && : Boolean and
  • || : Boolean or
  • ! : boolean not
  • () : used for grouping Boolean expressions, passing arguments to functions, and around conditions for "for","while", etc.

Code generation example

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Awk can be used to generate C code that one doesn't want to type by hand. For example, this script will generate an explicit 3x3 matrix multiplication routine: 

gawk 'BEGIN{
        for(i=0;i<3;i++)
         for(j=0;j<3;j++){
           printf("d[%d][%d]=",i,j);
           for(k=0;k<3;k++){
             printf("l[%d][%d]*r[%d][%d]%s",
                    i,k,k,j,(k<2)?"+":";\n");
           }
         }
     }'

Grand example

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And now for a grand example: 

# This awk program collects statistics on two 
# "random variables" and the relationships 
# between them. It looks only at fields 1 and 
# 2 by default Define the variables F and G 
# on the command line to force it to look at
# different fields.  For example: 
# awk -f stat_2o1.awk F=2 G=3 stuff.dat \
# F=3 G=5 otherstuff.dat
# or, from standard input: 
# awk -f stat_2o1.awk F=1 G=3
# It ignores blank lines, lines where either 
# one of the requested fields is empty, and 
# lines whose first field contains a number 
# sign. It requires only one pass through the
# data. This script works with vanilla awk 
# under SunOS 4.1.3.
BEGIN{
  F=1;
  G=2;
}
length($F) > 0 && \
length($G) > 0 && \
$1 !~/^#/ {
  sx1+= $F; sx2 += $F*$F;
  sy1+= $G; sy2 += $G*$G;
  sxy1+= $F*$G;
  if( N==0 ) xmax = xmin = $F;
  if( xmin > $F ) xmin=$F;
  if( xmax < $F ) xmax=$F;
  if( N==0 ) ymax = ymin = $G;
  if( ymin > $G ) ymin=$G;
  if( ymax < $G ) ymax=$G;
  N++;
}
 
END {
  printf("%d # N\n"   ,N   );
  if (N <= 1) 
    {
    printf("What's the point?\n");
    exit 1;
    }
  printf("%g # xmin\n",xmin);
  printf("%g # xmax\n",xmax);
  printf("%g # xmean\n",xmean=sx1/N);
  xSigma = sx2 - 2 * xmean * sx1+ N*xmean*xmean;
  printf("%g # xvar\n"         ,xvar =xSigma/  N  );
  printf("%g # xvar unbiased\n",xvaru=xSigma/(N-1));
  printf("%g # xstddev\n"         ,sqrt(xvar ));
  printf("%g # xstddev unbiased\n",sqrt(xvaru));
  
  printf("%g # ymin\n",ymin);
  printf("%g # ymax\n",ymax);
  printf("%g # ymean\n",ymean=sy1/N);
  ySigma = sy2 - 2 * ymean * sy1+ N*ymean*ymean;
  printf("%g # yvar\n"         ,yvar =ySigma/  N  );
  printf("%g # yvar unbiased\n",yvaru=ySigma/(N-1));
  printf("%g # ystddev\n"         ,sqrt(yvar ));
  printf("%g # ystddev unbiased\n",sqrt(yvaru));
  if ( xSigma * ySigma <= 0 )
    r=0;
  else 
    r=(sxy1 - xmean*sy1- ymean * sx1+ N * xmean * ymean)
      /sqrt(xSigma * ySigma);
  printf("%g # correlation coefficient\n", r);
  if( r > 1 || r < -1 )
    printf("SERIOUS ERROR! CORRELATION COEFFICIENT");
    printf(" OUTSIDE RANGE -1..1\n");

  if( 1-r*r != 0 )
    printf("%g # Student's T (use with N-2 degfreed)\n&", \
      t=r*sqrt((N-2)/(1-r*r)) );
  else
    printf("0 # Correlation is perfect,");
    printf(" Student's T is plus infinity\n");
  b = (sxy1 - ymean * sx1)/(sx2 - xmean * sx1);
  a = ymean - b * xmean;
  ss=sy2 - 2*a*sy1- 2*b*sxy1 + N*a*a + 2*a*b*sx1+ b*b*sx2 ;
  ss/= N-2;
  printf("%g # a = y-intercept\n", a);
  printf("%g # b = slope\n"      , b); 
  printf("%g # s^2 = unbiased estimator for sigsq\n",ss);
  printf("%g + %g * x # equation ready for cut-and-paste\n",a,b);
  ra = sqrt(ss * sx2 / (N * xSigma));
  rb = sqrt(ss       / (    xSigma));
  printf("%g # radius of confidence interval ");
  printf("for a, multiply by t\n",ra);
  printf("%g # radius of confidence interval ");
  printf("for b, multiply by t\n",rb);
}

This documentation was originally written by Andrew M. Ross. It can be found here and is released under the GFDL by the Harvey Mudd College Department of Computer Science.

Options

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Command-line options aka switches of awk:

  • -F field-separator: Use the field-separator regular expression to separate fields.
  • -f source-file
  • -v var=val: Set the variable to the value. Defined by POSIX; absent in the original awk.

Command-line options aka switches of GNU awk, beyond the bare-bones awk:

  • -W gawk-opt
  • ...
  • --posix
  • ...

Links:

Math

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The usual operators +, -, *, /, %, ^ are supported; ** is supported by gawk but not POSIX awk. Built-in math functions include exp, log, sqrt, sin, cos, atan2, rand, srand, and int.

Number literals are decimal; they can be hexadecimal and octal in the C language vein using the GNU extension in gawk.

Links:

User-defined functions

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User-defined functions can be defined as follows:

  • function plus(x,y) { return x+y }

Some awk implementations including gawk allow "func" to be used instead of "function", but that is not POSIX compliant.

Recursion is supported:

  • awk 'function fact(x) { if (x > 1) { return x*fact(x-1) } else return 1} BEGIN{print fact(4)}'

Links:

Bit manipulation

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Traditional awk does not have bitwise operators to provide bit manipulation. However, gawk has bit manipulation functions built in, including and(), or(), xor(), compl(), lshift() and rshift().

Links:

Inclusion of libraries

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Traditional awk has no way of including or importing libraries of functions in an awk program; the closest way is to use -f option multiple times. By contrast, gawk offers that possibility as a GNU extension, using @include keyword.

Full path to the library does not need to be specified as long as the directory in which the library file resides is in AWKPATH environment variable. Setting AWKPATH prevents awk from considering the current directory to be in the path unless AWKPATH includes period (.) to represent current directory. The item separator for AWKPATH is a colon (:), or semicolon (;) on Windows.

A library of awk functions can also be loaded via -i option, in gawk. Thus, if you have file lib.awk, path to that file's directory is in AWKPATH, and the file defines abs function, you can invoke gawk like this:

  • awk -ilib "BEGIN {print abs(-4)}"

This you cannot do with -f option; you would have to store the main program in a separate file and then use -f option twice on the same command line, first to load the library, second to load the main program.

Permissively licensed awk libraries can be found in Many AWK project at github.

Links:

Oneliner examples

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Oneliner examples of awk use:

  • echo abcd |awk '/b.*d/'
    • Outputs lines matching a regular expression, like grep command.
  • echo abcd |awk '/b.*d/ {print $0}'
    • Does the same as above, with an explicit print statement. $0 stands for the entire line.
  • echo ab   cd |awk '/b.*d/ {print $2}'
    • For lines matching a regular expression, outputs the second field. Uses a sequence of whitespace as a field separator by default. Thus, outputs "cd".
  • echo abcd,e |awk -F, '/b.*d/ {print $2}'
    • For lines matching a regular expression, outputs the second field, using comma as the field separator due to the -F option. Thus, outputs "e".
  • echo abcd,e |awk '{print toupper($0)}'
    • Outputs all the lines in uppercase. For lowercase, use "tolower".
  • echo a b c d | awk '{print $NF, $(NF-1)}'
    • Outputs the last field and next-to-last field; NF is the number of fields.
  • echo ab cd | awk 'NF>=2'
    • Outputs the lines where the number of fields is 2 or more.
  • echo ab cd | awk '{print NF}'
    • For each line, outputs the number of fields in it.
  • echo ab cd | awk 'length($2) > 1'
    • Outputs all lines such that the length of the 2nd field is greater than one.
  • echo ab cd | awk '$2 ~ /cd/'
    • Outputs all lines whose 2nd field matches the regular expression.
  • echo ab cd | awk '$1 ~ /ab/ && $2 ~ /cd/'
    • Like above, but with two subconditions connected by "&&". Supports some other logical operators known from the C programming language.
  • cat file.txt | awk 'NR >= 100 && NR <= 500'
    • Outputs the lines (records) whose line numbers are in the specified range. Thus, acts as a line number filter.
  • cat file.txt | awk 'NR == 1 || /reg.*pattern/'
    • Outputs the first line and lines matching the regular expression.
  • echo abcd | awk '{gsub(/ab/,"ef");print}'
    • Replacement aka substitution like in sed command; "g" in gsub stands for global.
  • awk 'BEGIN{for(i=1;i<6;i++) print sqrt(i)}'
    • Outputs the square roots of integers in 1, ..., 5. The use of BEGIN{} makes sure the code gets executed regardless of there being any input lines fed to awk. The for loop uses the familiar C language syntax, and sqrt is one of multiple math functions available.
  • awk 'BEGIN{printf "%i %.2f\n", 1, (2+3)/7}'
    • Function printf familiar from the C language is supported, as a statement not requiring surrounding brackets around the arguments.
  • awk 'BEGIN{for(i=1;i<9;i++) a[i]=i^2; for(i in a) print i, a[i]}'
    • Outputs a couple integers and their squares with the help of awk associative arrays AKA maps or dictionaries. The sequential order of the output is indeterminate, as is usual with associative array. Awk has no direct analogue of arrays and lists known from other programming languages.
  • cat file.txt | awk '{sum+=$1} END{print sum}'
    • Outputs the sum of the values in 1st field (column) using END keyword.
  • printf 1,2,3\\n4,5,6 | awk -F, '{s=0;for(i=1; i<=NF; i++) {s+=$i} print s}'
    • For each row of a comma-separated file, outputs sum of the fields (columns) in the row. Thus, iterates fields.
  • echo 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 | awk -F, -vn=7 '{for(i=1;i<=NF; i++) {s+=i>n?$i-$(i-n):$i; if(i>=n){printf "%.0f, ", s/n}else{printf ", "}}}'
    • Outputs comma-separated 7-value simple moving average of the input comma-separated series.
  • awk 'BEGIN{system("dir")}'
    • Runs an external command, dir; disabled in sandbox mode.
  • awk 'function abs(x) {return x < 0 ? -x : x} BEGIN{print abs(-4)}'
    • Defines and uses absolute value function. Shows use of the ternary operator known from the C language.

Links:

Trying online

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You can try awk online at http://awk.js.org/. Keywords: REPL online.

Limitations

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Compared to other scripting languages, AWK limitations include the following:

  • No direct analogue of arrays and lists known from other programming languages, only associative arrays.
  • No nested arrays: values of associative arrays cannot be arrays.
  • No true multidimensional arrays: multiple indices are stored as a single index made by joining the indices by a separator.
  • No sorting functions for arrays in the normal awk, only in gawk.
  • No bitwise operators in the normal awk; gawk has bit manipulation functions, including and(), or(), compl(), etc.
  • No support for libraries or modules that contain functions to be reused by awk scripts in traditional awk; however, gawk does support @include keyword serving the purpose.
  • No GUI programming.

Links:

Source code

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The source code for various versions of awk:

See also

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Books

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  • O'Reilly's sed & awk Pocket Reference
  • UNIX in a Nutshell
  • UNIX Power Tools
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