awk ¶Now that you’ve seen some of what awk can do,
you might wonder how awk could be useful for you. By using
utility programs, advanced patterns, field separators, arithmetic
statements, and other selection criteria, you can produce much more
complex output. The awk language is very useful for producing
reports from large amounts of raw data, such as summarizing information
from the output of other utility programs like ls.
(See A More Complex Example.)
Programs written with awk are usually much smaller than they would
be in other languages. This makes awk programs easy to compose and
use. Often, awk programs can be quickly composed at your keyboard,
used once, and thrown away. Because awk programs are interpreted, you
can avoid the (usually lengthy) compilation part of the typical
edit-compile-test-debug cycle of software development.
Complex programs have been written in awk, including a complete
retargetable assembler for
eight-bit microprocessors (see Glossary, for more information),
and a microcode assembler for a special-purpose Prolog
computer.
The original awk’s capabilities were strained by tasks
of such complexity, but modern versions are more capable.
If you find yourself writing awk scripts of more than, say,
a few hundred lines, you might consider using a different programming
language. The shell is good at string and pattern matching; in addition,
it allows powerful use of the system utilities. Python offers a nice
balance between high-level ease of programming and access to system
facilities.10