This section presents a number of POSIX utilities that are implemented in awk. Reinventing these programs in awk is often enjoyable, because the algorithms can be very clearly expressed, and the code is usually very concise and simple. This is true because awk does so much for you.
It should be noted that these programs are not necessarily intended to replace the installed versions on your system. Instead, their purpose is to illustrate awk language programming for “real world” tasks.
The programs are presented in alphabetical order.