Welcome to your journey with AWK programming. We all interact with data in our daily life in one way or another. Retrieving the desired, useful information from this data can seem like a difficult task, however, if we have the correct tools and proper knowledge of how to handle them, it's really not that difficult. This book will teach you how to efficiently handle one of the best of these tools, known as AWK. It is a standard feature of a Unix-like operating system to retrieve information from raw data. It will help you to understand trivial data-processing concepts in a user-friendly way.
This chapter is designed to give you a kickstart for writing your own simple AWK programs. Throughout the book, we will explain AWK, and work with useful and interesting examples to develop your problem-solving skills in AWK.
In this chapter, we will cover the following:
- An overview of the AWK programming language
- Different installation methods of AWK on the Linux environment
- Understanding the AWK workflow
- Learning how to create and run basic AWK programs in multiple ways
- Working with sample data files with a simple usage of AWK
- Understanding different AWK options
