How to Print Content of a File using awk command

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Introduction

This article is just an article for showing how to print the content of a file. Printing the content of a file have several ways to achieve it. Normally, there are lots of command available in linux operating system. Simply put, there are ways for printing the content of a file text in every kind of operating system. In this context, it is to print the content of the file into a standard output of terminal. So, in other words, performing the command is done in the command line interface following the output itself will present in that command line interface. The command line interface in this context is a terminal.

Using awk command

In this article, printing the content of a file is possible by using a command with the name of ‘awk’. In the manual page of ‘awk’ command, there is a general information stating that it is a command for pattern scanning and processing language. The following is the basic command pattern of ‘awk’ :

awk '/search_pattern/ { action_to_take_on_matches; another_action; }' file_to_parse

If there is no specific search pattern for further extraction from the file_to_parse, just skip it. On the other hand, there is a value for the part of { another_action }. It is a default action taken if there is no specific pattern matching to the file_to_parse. In this context, the action itself is just to print the content of the file. So, the command for printing the whole content of a file will be just print it using awk. The complete commmand to achieve it exist as follows : 

awk '{print}' /proc/meminfo

The command taking for action is ‘print’. It will print the content of the file where the name of the file passing as an example is ‘/proc/meminfo’. The execution of the above command is in the following output :

  

[root@localhost ~]# awk '{print}' /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:        8009408 kB
MemFree:         1243420 kB
MemAvailable:    4557100 kB
Buffers:            2092 kB
Cached:          3484704 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB
Active:          3691920 kB
Inactive:        2802972 kB
Active(anon):    3008476 kB
Inactive(anon):    16484 kB
Active(file):     683444 kB
Inactive(file):  2786488 kB
Unevictable:           0 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
SwapTotal:             0 kB
SwapFree:              0 kB
Dirty:                16 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:       3008096 kB
Mapped:            62556 kB
Shmem:             16864 kB
Slab:             169500 kB
SReclaimable:     130348 kB
SUnreclaim:        39152 kB
KernelStack:        5312 kB
PageTables:        10676 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:     4004704 kB
Committed_AS:    5670456 kB
VmallocTotal:   34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed:       22488 kB
VmallocChunk:   34359707388 kB
HardwareCorrupted:     0 kB
AnonHugePages:   2754560 kB
CmaTotal:              0 kB
CmaFree:               0 kB
HugePages_Total:       0
HugePages_Free:        0
HugePages_Rsvd:        0
HugePages_Surp:        0
Hugepagesize:       2048 kB
DirectMap4k:       92016 kB
DirectMap2M:     4102144 kB
DirectMap1G:     6291456 kB
[root@localhost ~]#

As in the output of the above command, the command itself will print the content of the ‘/proc/meminfo’.

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