Awk is mostly used for pattern scanning and processing. It searches one or more files to see if they contain lines that matches with the specified patterns and then performs the associated actions. Awk is abbreviated from the names of the developers – Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan.

What is awk F?

awk -F: ‘{print $4}’ awk – this is the interpreter for the AWK Programming Language. The AWK language is useful for manipulation of data files, text retrieval and processing. -F <value> – tells awk what field separator to use. In your case, -F: means that the separator is : (colon).

What does AWK mean in bash?

You can write awk scripts for complex operations or you can use awk from the command line. The name stands for Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan (yes, Brian Kernighan), the authors of the language, which was started in 1977, hence it shares the same Unix spirit as the other classic *nix utilities.