awk

Fast, scriptable field extraction, filtering, and aggregation on text records.

Quick Start

1. Verify awk is available: awk --version or awk 'BEGIN {print PROCINFO["version"]}'
2. Establish the command surface: man awk or awk --help
3. Start with a read-only probe on sample data: awk '{print $1, $3}' sample.txt

Intent Router

Load only the reference file needed for the active request.

• references/install-and-setup.md — Installing awk (GNU, mawk, nawk, POSIX) on macOS, Linux, Windows
• references/cheatsheet.md — Common flags, one-liners, field/record patterns, I/O control, built-in variables
• references/advanced-usage.md — Multi-dimensional arrays, string functions, regex subtleties, user-defined functions, scripting workflows, GNU vs BSD/POSIX differences
• references/troubleshooting.md — CSV edge cases, locale issues, field separator confusion, performance with large files, variable scope