Awk works on a very simple concepts:

• BEGIN and END patterns must include an action statement.
• User Defined pattern {action} may have:
  • a pattern without an action; where the entire record is printed for the pattern matched.
  • no pattern with an action; where all records are processed as the pattern match defaults to a true condition.

Awk can be a very intimidating program to learn. However, once you understand the basic components of:

How to Start a Program
as a commandreading program from a program source file

as the program can be part of a command line or part of a script file.

Understand the functionality of pattern action statements such as:

BEGIN and END statementsUser Defined Pattern Actions