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Preface

If you are like many computer users, you would frequently like to make changes in various text files wherever certain patterns appear, or extract data from parts of certain lines while discarding the rest. To write a program to do this in a language such as C or Pascal is a time-consuming inconvenience that may take many lines of code. The job may be easier with awk.

The awk utility interprets a special-purpose programming language that makes it possible to handle simple data-reformatting jobs easily with just a few lines of code.

This manual teaches you what awk does and how you can use awk effectively. You should already be familiar with basic system commands such as ls. Using awk you can:

• manage small, personal databases
• generate reports
• validate data
• produce indexes, and perform other document preparation tasks
• even experiment with algorithms that can be adapted later to other computer languages

This manual has the difficult task of being both tutorial and reference. If you are a novice, feel free to skip over details that seem too complex. You should also ignore the many cross references; they are for the expert user, and for the on-line Info version of the manual.

• History: The history of awk. Acknowledgements.

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