Book Image

Learning AWK Programming

By : Shiwang Kalkhanda
5 (1)
Book Image

Learning AWK Programming

5 (1)
By: Shiwang Kalkhanda

Overview of this book

AWK is one of the most primitive and powerful utilities which exists in all Unix and Unix-like distributions. It is used as a command-line utility when performing a basic text-processing operation, and as programming language when dealing with complex text-processing and mining tasks. With this book, you will have the required expertise to practice advanced AWK programming in real-life examples. The book starts off with an introduction to AWK essentials. You will then be introduced to regular expressions, AWK variables and constants, arrays and AWK functions and more. The book then delves deeper into more complex tasks, such as printing formatted output in AWK, control flow statements, GNU's implementation of AWK covering the advanced features of GNU AWK, such as network communication, debugging, and inter-process communication in the GAWK programming language which is not easily possible with AWK. By the end of this book, the reader will have worked on the practical implementation of text processing and pattern matching using AWK to perform routine tasks.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Escape sequences for special character printing

As we use a simple string with printf, we can use any escape sequences to print control characters that are difficult to represent. These are special characters that do not represent their literal meaning when used inside a string; instead they represent something special that would otherwise be difficult to represent as such. Most of the escape sequences consist of at least two characters, the first of which is a backslash character \, which is used to escape or mark a special character.

The following table lists the special characters that form the escape sequences with special meanings inside printf:

Special character

Description

\n

Newline

\t

Tab

\v

Vertical tab

\b

Backspace

\r

Carriage return

\f

Form feed

\<any character>

That character

\'

Single quotation

...