Data exploration with awk
Help 5 / 12
Variables

Using variables to count sums

Let’s now tackle something more involved: counting the number of times someone ordered a chicken bowl.

To do so, we’ll use awk’s BEGIN and END statements, which let you run some code once before processing your file (BEGIN), and once after all rows in the file have been processed (END):

awk -F "\t" ' \
   BEGIN { sum = 0 } \
   { if($3 == "Chicken Bowl") sum += $2 } \
   END { print(sum) }' orders.tsv

Let’s break this down:

  • Begin block: We initialize the variable sum to 0
  • Body block: For each line in the file, if the customer ordered a Chicken Bowl, we increment sum by the number of bowls ordered
  • End block: Once we processed all lines, print the total sum
← Previous Next →