awk basics (field processing) in Linux CLI - Mini Project: Build & Apply

awk basics (field processing)

📖 Scenario: You have a text file with information about fruits and their prices. You want to use awk to process this data and extract useful information.

🎯 Goal: Learn how to use awk to read fields from a text file and print specific columns.

📋 What You'll Learn

Use awk to process text data

Understand fields and how to access them with $1, $2, etc.

Print specific fields from each line

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Processing text files with columns of data is common in system logs, reports, and CSV files. <code>awk</code> helps extract and manipulate this data quickly.

💼 Career

Many IT, data analysis, and system administration jobs require basic <code>awk</code> skills to automate data extraction and reporting.

1

Create the data file

Create a file named fruits.txt with these exact lines:
Apple 100
Banana 50
Cherry 75

Linux CLI

# Create the file fruits.txt with the given lines
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use echo with -e and redirect output to fruits.txt.

2

Set the field separator

Write an awk command that uses space as the field separator explicitly with -F " " and reads from fruits.txt.

Linux CLI

awk -F " " 
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use awk -F " " '{print $1, $2}' fruits.txt to print both fields.

3

Print only the fruit names

Modify the awk command to print only the first field (fruit name) from fruits.txt.

Linux CLI

awk -F " " '{print $1}' fruits.txt
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use {print $1} to print only the first field.

4

Print fruit names with prices doubled

Write an awk command that prints the fruit name and the price multiplied by 2 from fruits.txt.

Linux CLI

awk -F " " '{print $1, $2 * 2}' fruits.txt
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use {print $1, $2 * 2} to multiply the second field by 2.