What is an AWK file?
An AWK file is a script file created for the text processing application AWK that comes bundled with Unix and Linux operating systems. It contains logical instructions to perform actions on text or contents of a file such as matching, replacing and printing text. This helps generate reports and formatted text from the input file. The awk utility is usually located in /usr/bin/awk on most linux/unix distributions.
How to Create AWK Script?
An AWK file can be created or opened in any text editor on Linux/Unix OS. A new AWK script file can be created as follow.
$ vi script.awk
This will open the AWK file in text editor. Enter some statements in the text editor as follow.
#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN { printf "%s\n","Writing my first Awk executable script!" }
The first line of this text content is explained as follow.
- #! – referred to as
Shebang, which specifies an interpreter for the instructions in a script - /usr/bin/awk – is the interpreter
- -f – interpreter option, used to read a program file
How to Execute AWK Script?
Save the file and make the script executable by issuing the command below:
$ chmod +x script.awk
The script can then be run as follow.
$ ./script.awk
that results in the following output.
Writing my first Awk executable script!
