Command Line Examples: gawk

gawk is a powerful stream editor that can be used in command pipelines to perform special functions that do not have a command written for. The easiest use of gawk (and a very common one) is to manipulate the columns in text stream.

In the examples that follow, assume that a file name test-data.txt exists and contains 3 columns of data.

user@host: $ cat test-data.txt
1  11  21
2  12  22
3  13  23
4  14  24

Print only columns 1 and 2 of the datafile

user@host: $ cat test-data.txt| gawk '{print $1,$2}'
1 11
2 12
3 13
4 14