AWK is your friend

The Unix philosophy is all about simple tools that fit the job at hand. awk is one of the better examples of this, alongside familiar commands like grep and less etc.

A recent linux.com article catchily titled AWK is your friend reminded me that many people aren't familiar with how handy awk is. This article isn't fantastic, but it's worth a read as are the comments at the end.

The document that alerted me to how handy the awk command can be—even for a seasoned Perl hacker—is How to get things done with awk written by Sakari Mattila. I recommend it over the linux.com article for usefulness as both an introduction and resource. Sakari has updated it a number of times over 8 years, so it is probably safe to trust it's accuracy!

Another document that looks excellent is An Introduction to AWK by Brian Brown. Like Sakari's article this one was written in 1994, but apears not to have been updated since.