How to Perform awk Commands in PowerShell

awk is a scripting language for data manipulation and report generation. awk is a command-line programming language that supports variables, text functions, numeric functions, and logical operators without compiling.

Unfortunately, awk is not fully integrated into PowerShell since it uses the Windows operating system. This article will discuss how we can use similar commands and functions to the awk commands using PowerShell.

Perform awk Commands in PowerShell

The awk utility allows programmers to create brief but powerful programs in the form of statements that specify text patterns, which may be strange to users unfamiliar with Linux commands or Linux in general. These text patterns are searched in each line, and action is taken when a match is found.

awk is mainly used for pattern scanning and processing. It explores one or more files to see if they contain lines that match the specified patterns and then performs the associated actions.

The following code snippet is an example of a command that uses awk.

awk '/"Box11"/ { print $0 }' test.txt|awk '{ SUM += $4} END { print SUM} '

To perform similar operations like the awk commands, we would use the Get-Content command to get the contents of a file and perform a couple of string operations in Windows PowerShell. If we will take the example above, this is what it would look like in PowerShell.

Example Code:

Get-Content c:\temp\test.txt |
    Where-Object { $_ -match '"Box11"' } |
    ForEach-Object { ($_ -split "\s+")[3] } |
    Measure-Object -Sum |
    Select-Object -ExpandProperty Sum

• The Get-Content command will get the contents of the text file.
• The Where-Object command will filter the lines with the Box11 string.
• Then, once filtered out, the script will loop to split each line string in its 4th element. Remember that PowerShell starts at index 0; thus, we use index 3 instead of 4, unlike in our awk command.
• The Measure-Object will perform a calculation on the property, where it is Sum in this case.
• Lastly, the Select-Object will output the Sum expanded property.

If we notice, our PowerShell version of the awk command is slightly longer. Good thing that in PowerShell, we can create shortcuts by using aliases and a couple of PowerShell operators.

Example Code:

gc c:\temp\test.txt | ? { $_ -match '"Box11"' } | % { (-split $_)[3] } |
    measure -Sum | select -Exp Sum

Alternatively, if you have WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) enabled, we can run awk commands as it is. A feature of the Windows operating system called the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) enables you to run a Linux file system, complete with Linux command-line tools and GUI applications, directly on Windows.

So we must call the wsl command and perform awk commands natively.

Example Code:

wsl -e awk '/"Box11"/{sum += $4} END{print sum}' test.txt