awk: Simple and combined patterns

A simple usage for the awk command is to find lines in a file or a stream match given patterns. The command

awk '/pattern/' filename

is equivalent to

grep pattern filename

But awk is more powerful than grep, in that we can display only specific fields from the matching lines. The command

awk '/pattern/ {print $2}' filename

will only print the second field of the matching lines.

Patterns can be combined with the &&, || and ! operators.

awk '/foo/ && /bar/ {print $2}' example.txt awk '/foo/ && !/bar/ {print $2}' example.txt

The first command above will print the second field of the lines in example.txt that contain both 'foo' and 'bar', while the second one will only match the lines that contain 'foo' but not 'bar'.