Linux 2
5 min speech on awk

AWK is an interpreted programming language designed for text processing and typically used as a data extraction and reporting tool. It is a standard feature of most Unix-like operating systems. Awk is a utility/language designed for data extraction. If the word "extraction" rings a bell, it should because awk was one of Larry Wall's inspirations when he created Perl. Awk is often used with sed to perform useful and practical text manipulation chores, and it depends on the task if you should use awk or Perl. Awk's funny name comes from the names of its original authors, Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan and Peter J. Weinberger. Most of you probably recognize the Kernighan name; he is one of the fathers of the C programming language and a major force in the UNIX world. One of the most simple and popular uses of awk is selecting a column from a text file or other command's output. There are many different concepts.one basic concept is $ dpkg -l | awk ' /'vim'/ {print $2} ' This command would print all packages installed that have "vim" in their names. Awk uses some internal variables to assign certain pieces of information as it processes a file. The internal variables that awk uses are:

FILENAME: References the current input file.
FNR: References the number of the current record relative to the current input file. For instance, if you have two input files, this would tell you the record number of each file instead of as a total.
FS: The current field separator used to denote each field in a record. By default, this is set to whitespace.
NF: The number of fields in the current record.
NR: The number of the current record.
OFS: The field separator for the outputted data. By default, this is set to whitespace.
ORS: The record separator for the outputted data. By default, this is a newline character.
RS: The record separator used to distinguish separate records in the input file. By default, this is a newline character.By default, awk assumes that a space delimits the fields, or columns, in a file. If your file uses a different character, you can tell awk this by passing it the -F parameter with your delimiting character in double quotes. For example: -F”:” for a file delimited with colons.

References https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-the-awk-language-to-manipulate-text-in-linux http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Awk.html http://linux.die.net/man/1/awk http://m.linuxjournal.com/article/8913
http://www.computerhope.com/unix/uawk.htm