Make sure you’re comfortable with the Terminal Basics (e.g. ls, head, tail, grep) before going through this tutorial.
Awk is a power tool to help you filter, extract and transform data files on the command line.
It is most commonly used with tab- and comma-separated files, where the idea is to apply a certain transformation to every line (and sometimes column) of a file. As you’ll see later in this tutorial, awk is actually a full-fledged programming language!
Here we’ll reuse the orders.tsv file from the Terminal Basics tutorial (), which contains take-out order data from Chipotle.
Time to wrangle some data!