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 ...

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 ...

How to use awk to select data from commands and scripts Your email has been sent Image: iStock/Inimma-IS Must-read developer coverage What Powers Your Databases? Take This DZone Survey Today!

I use awk all the time, but generally only to conveniently pull a particular field out of data that I’m workin with. Regardless of the separator used, awk makes it easy to extract just what you need.

I never used awk except when reading other people's scripts, because perl could do awk stuff almost as easily, while also allowing you to expand seamlessly into more complicated tasks that would be ...