The awk command

The name awk is an acronym constructed from the initials of its developers (Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan). Awk is fairly complex text processing language, but it has some nice features for the average user.

awk [options] [script]

The main feature of awk that I use is the ability to parse text into columns. This is useful for extracting a single column to work on or for reordering columns.

Examples:

• Kill all processes owned by a specific user

  ps -ef | grep ^luser | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs kill

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