Example 1

Slicing the input

bash$ ls -lg | awk '{ print $3, ":", $7 }'

• Who tells awk which character to take as field separator?
• And why are there spaces between the fields in the output string?

Specifying the field separator

BEGIN { FS=":"; OFS=""; }
{ print $1, "'s name is: ", $5 }

awk -f programfile /etc/passwd

Some Builtin-Variables

• FS field separator
• OFS output field separator
• NF number of fields
• RS row separator (default: "\n")
• ORS output row separator (default: "\n")
• ARGC number of command line arguments
• ARGV verctor of command line arguments
• etc.