Awk - powerful tool

Awk is a scripting language that can be used in shell. Please find here some examples:

1. We've got a file that contains lines and columns (separated with spaces). We want to print only the contents of 3rd column.
   
   cat file.txt | awk '{print $3}'
   


2. Print last column:
   
   cat file.txt | awk '{print $NF}'
   
   $NF means for awk the last argument (here: column)


3. Print the first expression before '/' sign:
   
   cat file.txt | awk -F '/' '{print $1}'
   
   Using -F option you can set different separators for awk arguments.


4. Another example. Printing last column + some text before it + some text after:
   
   cat file.txt | awk '{print "cp /home/"$1" "$1}'
   
   If you have filenames from /home directory in the file.txt this will prepare copying those file to current directory.