14.2 Reinventing Wheels for Fun and Profit

This section presents a number of POSIX utilities that are implemented in awk. Reinventing these programs in awk is often enjoyable, because the algorithms can be very clearly expressed, and the code is usually very concise and simple. This is true because awk does so much for you.

It should be noted that these programs are not necessarily intended to replace the installed versions on your system. Instead, their purpose is to illustrate awk language programming for "real world" tasks.

The programs are presented in alphabetical order.

14.2.1 Cutting out Fields and Columns		The cut utility.
14.2.2 Searching for Regular Expressions in Files		The egrep utility.
14.2.3 Printing out User Information		The id utility.
14.2.4 Splitting a Large File into Pieces		The split utility.
14.2.5 Duplicating Output into Multiple Files		The tee utility.
14.2.6 Printing Non-Duplicated Lines of Text		The uniq utility.
14.2.7 Counting Things		The wc utility.