What is the difference between grep and awk

But you can't write with grep a simple code to perform more complex tasks like further processing of matched records, computation or printing results without using other tools. Use awk whenever you find yourself piping greps and seds and sorts and uniqs and the like. So instead of. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Using grep vs awk Ask Question. Asked 8 years, 2 months ago. Active 1 month ago. Viewed 15k times. Improve this question. Precede any command, even shell scripts, with the time command to time how long it takes to run the command. Ex: time ls -l. Add a comment.

Active Oldest Votes. Note - I ran both commands twice so that caching would not potentially skew the results More details about interpreted languages on wikipedia. Improve this answer. Drav Sloan Drav Sloan 13k 4 4 gold badges 40 40 silver badges 41 41 bronze badges. Without saying what grep or awk implementation you're using and on what computer architecture, and with which system character set, those timings have little value. I dont doubt that grep is quicker but not by as much as your numbers show.

Funny enough, with the BSD tools on a Mac , awk Gnu awk owns them all at 5. By far the most important difference between grep and awk wrt matching regexps is that grep searches the whole line for a matching string while awk can search specific fields and so provide more precision and fewer false matches. As a rough guide: searching for lines matching a substring or regexp? It's less expressive than awk but that lends it to somewhat easier use for simple tasks.

It has many more complicated operators you can use I think it's even turing complete , but in general you won't use those features.

I just want to mention a thing, there are many tools can do text processing, e. A lazy way not the best way to learn text processing might be: only learn grep , sed and awk. AND, if you 've learned and used the three, you knew the difference. Actually, the difference here means which tool is good at solving what kind of problem. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Asked 10 years, 1 month ago. Active 3 years, 4 months ago. Viewed k times. Improve this question. Add a comment. Tuesday, September 18, grep vs awk : 10 examples of pattern search. However, many of the things which is done using grep and few more commands can be done using a simple awk command.

In this article, we will see the awk altenative for the frequently used grep commands. Unknown September 19, at AM. Guru Prasad September 19, at AM. Unknown September 20, at AM. Guru Prasad September 20, at AM.