1.5 A More Complex Example ¶

Now that we’ve mastered some simple tasks, let’s look at what typical awk programs do. This example shows how awk can be used to summarize, select, and rearrange the output of another utility. It uses features that haven’t been covered yet, so don’t worry if you don’t understand all the details:

ls -l | awk '$6 == "Nov" { sum += $5 }
             END { print sum }'

This command prints the total number of bytes in all the files in the current directory that were last modified in November (of any year).

As a reminder, the output of ‘ls -l’ gives you a listing of the files in a directory, including each file’s size and the date the file was last modified. The first field contains read-write permissions, the second field contains the number of links to the file, and the third field identifies the file’s owner. The fourth field identifies the file’s group. The fifth field contains the file’s size in bytes. The sixth, seventh, and eighth fields contain the month, day, and time, respectively, that the file was last modified. Finally, the ninth field contains the file name.

The ‘$6 == "Nov"’ in our awk program is an expression that tests whether the sixth field of the output from ‘ls -l’ matches the string ‘Nov’. Each time a line has the string ‘Nov’ for its sixth field, awk performs the action ‘sum += $5’. This adds the fifth field (the file’s size) to the variable sum. As a result, when awk has finished reading all the input lines, sum is the total of the sizes of the files whose lines matched the pattern. (This works because awk variables are automatically initialized to zero.)

After the last line of output from ls has been processed, the END rule executes and prints the value of sum. In this example, the value of sum is 80600.

These more advanced awk techniques are covered in later sections (see Actions). Before you can move on to more advanced awk programming, you have to know how awk interprets your input and displays your output. By manipulating fields and using print statements, you can produce some very useful and impressive-looking reports.