CAFAI Liens en Vrac 17/01/2015 Awk is a tiny programming language and a command line tool. It's particularly appropriate for log parsing on servers, mostly because Awk will operate on files, usually structured in lines of human-readable text.
I say it's useful on servers because log files, dump files, or whatever text format servers end up dumping to disk will tend to grow large, and you'll have many of them per server. If you ever get into the situation where you have to analyze gigabytes of files from 50 different servers without tools like Splunk or its equivalents, it would feel fairly bad to have and download all these files locally to then drive some forensics on them.
This personally happens to me when some Erlang nodes tend to die and leave a crash dump of 700MB to 4GB behind, or on smaller individual servers (say a VPS) where I need to quickly go through logs, looking for a common pattern.
In any case, Awk does more than finding data (otherwise, grep or ack would be enough) — it also lets you process the data and transform it.
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