4 Things to know about awk

Language structure: The basic format of scripts are ```awk pattern1 { ACTION; ACTION; … }

pattern2 { ACTION; …}

The input is always one line at a time of a text file. Each pattern is checked; if it matches/passes, the actions within the braces are run. Also if you leave off the pattern, it runs the actions on every line, 

2. **Fields**: awk splits the files into "fields". You use `$1` to get the first column, `$2` for second, etc. `$0` prints the entire line. So if you want to rearrange the columns to be (4, 2, 3, 1), you'd write
```awk
{print $4, $2, $3, $1}

Variables You can initialize variables inside the brace of a BEGIN { ... } block:
```
# initialize a variable x to 0
BEGIN { x = 0 } 
# add up all of the second column
{ x += $2 }
# print it after going through all the lines
END { print x }
```
There are “special” variables, which include the input/output “field separator” FS/OFS (by default any amount of white space) or input/output “record separator” RS/ORS (by default \n)
Comparisons: You can do comparisons which are “fuzzy matching” like in javascript: numbers are coerced to strings, strings to numbers:
```
# print lines where column 1 is the string "a", column 2 is a number > 10
($1 == "a") && ($2 > 10) {print $0}
```

Based on (1), I just learned that why my most commonly used awk one liner, ps aux | grep <blah> | awk {print $2} | xargs kill will run on every line and has to be surrounded by braces. - Any apparently is redundant with the grep? Now I know I can do ps aux | awk '/blah/' {print $2}

References

https://ferd.ca/awk-in-20-minutes.html
https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/awk/