In this chapter, we learned that the basic construct of the AWK program is pattern-action pairs. We saw how it can be installed on the Linux system using different package managers or by compiling from the source code. We learned AWK basic usage, such as how to run AWK programs in different ways, as per the requirement. We looked at how to use comments and quotes with AWK. We also learned the usage of the backslash for extending our program across multiple lines. Finally, we covered three standard options for all versions of AWK, which are -f, -F, and -v, as well as other GNU extensions of AWK (GAWK) options, such as profiling, dumping variables, and including other files in your program.
In next chapter, we will learn about regular expressions and how they are handled with AWK.