awk vs. sed
Both awk and sed are command-line utilities that are used to transform text.
Let’s take a look at the major differences between them.
awk
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It works with delimited fields on a per-line basis.
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It is mainly used to search and print data from text files.
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It has advanced programming constructs like for, while, do-while, and multi-dimensional arrays.
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It is more robust than sed.
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Writing mathematical expressions in awk is easy.
sed
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It works with characters on a per-line basis.
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It is primarily used to filter and modify text files.
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It has fairly limited programming constructs like pattern matching and simple conditionals.
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It is less robust than awk.
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Writing mathematical expressions in sed is hard.
Commands
awk
The following command prints the first and second columns of myfile.txt with a space in between.
awk ‘{print $1 “ ” $2}’ myfile.txt
sed
The following command replaces “helo” with “hello”
in myfile.txt.
sed ‘s/helo/hello/’ myfile.txt
