The awk command can make it easy to remove duplicate characters from a string even when those characters aren’t sequential, especially when the process is turned into a script. First, the awk command ...

The first command we’ll examine in this post is a very unusual awk command that systematically removes every line in the file that is encountered more than once. It leaves the first instance of the ...

I love chaining commands as much as anyone, and sed, awk, grep, and perl are some of my best friends. However, remember that, in *nix, each command runs in its own process, the resources required for ...

In an earlier article ("GNU Awk 4.0: Teaching an Old Bird Some New Tricks", published in the September 2011 issue of Linux Journal), I gave a brief history of awk and gawk and provided a high-level ...

As a relatively isolated junior sysadmin, I remember seeing answers on Experts Exchange and later Stack Exchange that baffled me. Authors and commenters might chain 10 commands together with pipes and ...