This week in between lots of Python and maths and things, I have been learning about awk. Awk is a programming language for doing stuff to text files that consist of columns of data. You can use awk at the command line.
awk ‘<condition> {<command>}’ ./<filename>
will execute <command> on lines in the file called <filename> that meet <condition>. So if you want to print out all the lines that contain the word “banana”, you would type
awk ‘/banana/ {print $0}’ ./<filename>
Enclosing “banana” in / asks awk to search for it. Awk uses dollar symbols to refer to columns. $1 is the first column, $2 the second, and so on. $0 refers to the entire line.
awk ‘$1 == “10″{print $2}’ ./<filename>
will print out the second column of all the lines on which the first column says “10″