Delete occurances of a string

awk '{ gsub(/string/,""); print }'

Replace text1 with text2

awk '{ gsub(/text1/,text2); print }'

Replace text1 with text2 only lines that contain Hello

awk '/Hello/ { gsub(/text1/,text2); print }'

Replace text1 with text2 only lines that do NOT contain Hello

awk '!/Hello/ { gsub(/text1/,text2); print }'

Swap first field with the second field

awk '{ temp = $1; $1 = $2; $2 = temp; print }'

Delete the second field

awk '{ $2 = ""; print }'

Remove duplicate, nonconsecutive lines

awk '!a[$0]++'

Show lines based on field-criteria

  • Show processes in uninterruptible sleep (usually IO):
ps aux|awk '{if ($8 == "D") print}'

Use substr with print

Useful for when combining with uniq -c for log file analysis:

awk '{print substr($4,0,6)}' squidaccess.log | uniq -c
   2571 [14/J
   7365 [15/J
   8085 [16/J
   6537 [17/J
    200 [18/J
     90 [19/J

Substitute characters before extracting data

Used here for named query logging analysis:

awk '/query:/ { gsub(/#/," "); print $2 " "$5}' named.log | sort | uniq -c|sort -n

All "#" are changed to a space to allow $2 to print just the ip address.

See Also

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/awk-one-liners-explained-part-two/

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/awk-book/

Category:Linux