Awk

awk is a command for string operations. It allows you to only show the third column of a file for example. awk is not a simple command, but rather a programming language on its own. awk and gawk, its GNU implementation, are used synonymously.

Examples

Show only the second column of file.txt

awk '{print $2;}' file.txt

kill all processes of a user

ps --no-header -fu <username> | awk '{ print $2 }' | grep -v $$ | xargs kill

See also

• gawk man page