I wrote my answer to this a few years ago: https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/a-crash-course-in-awk/ https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/a-crash-course-in-awk/ A

I wrote my answer to this a few years ago: https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/a-crash-course-in-awk/ https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/a-crash-course-in-awk/ A tl;dr for the following tl;dr: it's great for quick-and-dirty processing of logs. The tl;dr is that AWK is simple language that lets you use a line-oriented event driven programming model to process text. This abstraction is simple enough to be readable and maintainable, but powerful enough to parse and process text with line-oriented structure. The example linked elsewhere is worth studying, because it truly is one of the prettiest pieces of programming I've seen in a long while: https://c2.com/doc/expense/ https://c2.com/doc/expense/ If you don't know anything about AWK, here's all you need to know to grok this: 1. An AWK program is a list of [event] { code } pairs. All pairs are run in sequence on each line of input; if the "event" evaluates to true or is a matching regex, the matching code runs. 2. { code } on its own runs unconditionally. 3. The input is automatically whitespace delimited into fields; $1 refers to field 1, $2 to field 2, etc 4. NF is a special value that yields the number of fields 5. Assigning to fields replaces the text in those fields. 6. ($1+0) != 0 implicitly converts $1 to an integer; if it fails, the value is 0. There is a lot of implicit loose typing in the language, and usage of undefined variables is idiomatic. Functions aren't easy to use, either. So it's not well-suited for programming in the large, or even the medium. But for the scale of programming seen in that link, it's truly a wonderful and simple power tool.