Awk

References

• An Awk Primer (good tutorial on Awk)

Awk Program Examples

ps al | awk '{print $2}'                                         # Print second field of ps output
arp -n 10.137.3.129|awk '/ether/{print $3}'                      # Print third field of arp output, if line contains 'ether' somewhere
getent hosts unix.stackexchange.com | awk '{ print $1 ; exit }'  # Print only first line, then exit
find /proc -type l | awk -F"/" '{print $3}'                      # Print second folder name (i.e. process pid)

Tips

• Defining environment variable - Using an Awk script and Bash builtin eval

eval $(awk 'BEGIN{printf "MY_VAR=value";}')
echo $MY_VAR