Quick Unix reports with the "awk" program

We live in an age of newer, faster, more sophisticated, but sometimes older software tools can solve a problem neatly and with minimal fuss. So it is with shell script programming and some of the simple but powerful commands included with the Unix / Linux / Mac OS X environment. In fact, I've been using computers for long enough that I have an affinity for the command line, so I was intrigued to receive a request from someone to help them write an awk script to help extract blocks of data from a telephony reporting system. In just a few lines, I demonstrate how to accomplish this task:

    Generating reports with Unix's AWK command

It's not glamorous, but if you're delving into the command line either as a user or administrator, I personally believe that awk can be an excellent addition to your bag of tricks.