awk is a highly powerful programming language whereas grep is just a filtration tool. However, many of the things which is done using grep and few more commands can be done using a simple awk command. In this article, we will see the awk altenative for the frequently used grep commands.
When only searching for strings, and speed matters, you should almost always use grep . It's orders of magnitude faster than awk when it comes to just gross searching.
The sed command is a stream editor that works on streams of characters. It's a more powerful tool than grep as it offers more options for text processing purposes, including the substitute command, which sed is most commonly known for.
Grep is used for finding text patterns in a file and is the simplest of the three. Sed can find and modify data, however, its syntax is a bit more complex than grep. AWK is a full-fledged programming language that can process text and perform comparison and arithmetic operations on the extracted text.
Short definition:
grep
: search for specific terms in a file
#usage
$ grep This file.txt
Every line containing "This"
Every line containing "This"
Every line containing "This"
Every line containing "This"
$ cat file.txt
Every line containing "This"
Every line containing "This"
Every line containing "That"
Every line containing "This"
Every line containing "This"
Now awk
and sed
are completly different than grep
.
awk
and sed
are text processors. Not only do they have the ability to find what you are looking for in text, they have the ability to remove, add and modify the text as well (and much more).
awk
is mostly used for data extraction and reporting. sed
is a stream editor
Each one of them has its own functionality and specialties.
Example
Sed
$ sed -i 's/cat/dog/' file.txt
# this will replace any occurrence of the characters 'cat' by 'dog'
Awk
$ awk '{print $2}' file.txt
# this will print the second column of file.txt
Basic awk
usage:
Compute sum/average/max/min/etc. what ever you may need.
$ cat file.txt
A 10
B 20
C 60
$ awk 'BEGIN {sum=0; count=0; OFS="\t"} {sum+=$2; count++} END {print "Average:", sum/count}' file.txt
Average: 30
I recommend that you read this book: Sed & Awk: 2nd Ed.
It will help you become a proficient sed/awk user on any unix-like environment.
Grep is useful if you want to quickly search for lines that match in a file. It can also return some other simple information like matching line numbers, match count, and file name lists.
Awk is an entire programming language built around reading CSV-style files, processing the records, and optionally printing out a result data set. It can do many things but it is not the easiest tool to use for simple tasks.
Sed is useful when you want to make changes to a file based on regular expressions. It allows you to easily match parts of lines, make modifications, and print out results. It's less expressive than awk but that lends it to somewhat easier use for simple tasks. It has many more complicated operators you can use (I think it's even turing complete), but in general you won't use those features.
I just want to mention a thing, there are many tools can do text processing, e.g. sort, cut, split, join, paste, comm, uniq, column, rev, tac, tr, nl, pr, head, tail.....
they are very handy but you have to learn their options etc.
A lazy way (not the best way) to learn text processing might be: only learn grep , sed and awk. with this three tools, you can solve almost 99% of text processing problems and don't need to memorize above different cmds and options. :)
AND, if you 've learned and used the three, you knew the difference. Actually, the difference here means which tool is good at solving what kind of problem.
a more lazy way might be learning a script language (python, perl or ruby) and do every text processing with it.
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