awk is a highly underrated Unix utility. I’ve seen very few developers use it, but it’s both powerful and useful. Awk is a language of its own, but you don’t need to master it to start using it.

Some time back, I moved a large bunch of files to a home directory in a server by mistake. I had used the following (naive) command to move them back to the original location (according to my notebook):

ls -ltr | grep '14:57' | awk '{print $8}' | xargs -I '{}' mv {} vftemp

Apparently I had exploited the fact that the moved files all had the 14:57 time stamp and filtered them with grep, and then used awk to get the 8th column of the list, which should have been the filenames and moved them back.