awk is a text processing and data extraction/manipulation tool that takes text file or standard input and produces processed output.
Here are some of the most common tasks awk can help with:
- extract specific data fields (portions of text line) based on awk field separators
- calculate number of processed or skipped lines
- calculate number of fields in a line of text
- complete basic calculations with felds of data extracted from text
- reformat data to match expected data fields format
- reorder data fields