AWK Interview Questions 1

Awk is powerful tool in Unix. Awk is an excellent tool for processing the files which have data arranged in rows and columns format. It is a good filter and report writer.
1. How to run awk command specified in a file?
awk -f filename

2. Write a command to print the squares of numbers from 1 to 10 using awk command
awk 'BEGIN { for(i=1;i<=10;i++) {print "square of",i,"is",i*i;}}'

3. Write a command to find the sum of bytes (size of file) of all files in a directory.
ls -l | awk 'BEGIN {sum=0} {sum = sum + $5} END {print sum}'

4. In the text file, some lines are delimited by colon and some are delimited by space. Write a command to print the third field of each line.

awk '{ if( $0 ~ /:/ ) { FS=":"; } else { FS =" "; } print $3 }' filename

5. Write a command to print the line number before each line?
awk '{print NR, $0}' filename

6. Write a command to print the second and third line of a file without using NR.
awk 'BEGIN {RS="";FS="\n"} {print $2,$3}' filename

7. Write a command to print zero byte size files?
ls -l | awk '/^-/ {if ($5 !=0 ) print $9 }'

8. Write a command to rename the files in a directory with "_new" as postfix?
ls -F | awk '{print "mv "$1" "$1".new"}' | sh

9. Write a command to print the fields in a text file in reverse order?
awk 'BEGIN {ORS=""} { for(i=NF;i>0;i--) print $i," "; print "\n"}' filename

10. Write a command to find the total number of lines in a file without using NR
awk 'BEGIN {sum=0} {sum=sum+1} END {print sum}' filename

Another way to print the number of lines is by using the NR. The command is
awk 'END{print NR}' filename