AWK equivalent in Windows Powershell

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Powershell has lot of features and abilities for text parsing. AWK is one of very powerful commands available for text parsing in Unix/Linux. We do not have a Awk like cmdlet in Powershell. But we can do everything in Powershell that can be done with Awk.

Powershell combined with .Net Classes provide very powerful regular expressions for text parsing.

Now, lets play with Bash Awk and Powershell. I'm going to create a test.csv file for our testing and use that through out this topic.

Content of test.csv for our testing

1,Tony Passaquale,7920,20090222 21:59:00,800,4.78,3824,Follow-up
2,Nigel Shan Shanford,30316,20090405 16:34:00,400,9.99,3996,New-Opportunity
3,Selma Cooper,97455,20090405 16:31:00,1000,9.99,9990,Pre-Approach
4,Allen James,95140,20090405 16:31:00,1000,9.99,9990,New-Opportunity

So, Lets jump in

Display second field in test.csv

[jagadish.g@localhost Scripts]$ cat test.csv | awk -F, '{print $2}'
Tony Passaquale
Nigel Shan Shanford
Selma Cooper
Allen James

PS C:\Scripts> Get-Content .\test.csv | %{ $_.Split(',')[1]; }
Tony Passaquale
Nigel Shan Shanford
Selma Cooper
Allen James

Now, lets try getting the total value of third field in all the records in test.csv

[jagadish.g@localhost Scripts]$ cat test.csv | awk -F, '{total+=$3} END {print "Total: "total}'
Total: 230831

PS C:\Scripts> Get-Content .\test.csv | %{ [int]$total+=$_.Split(',')[2]; } ; Write-Host "Total: $total"
Total: 230831

Get no of fields in each record

[jagadish.g@localhost Scripts]$ cat test.csv | awk -F, '{print "No of fields in record "$1" = "NF }'
No of fields in record 1 = 8
No of fields in record 2 = 8
No of fields in record 3 = 8
No of fields in record 4 = 8

PS C:\Scripts> Get-Content .\test.csv | %{ $a=$_.Split(','); Write-Host "No of fields in record"$a[0]"="$a.length; }
No of fields in record 1 = 8
No of fields in record 2 = 8
No of fields in record 3 = 8
No of fields in record 4 = 8

Regular Expression matching in Awk and Powershell. Print a record if the last field contains any of these lowercase characters (a, b or c)

[jagadish.g@localhost Scripts]$ cat test.csv | awk -F, '{if ($NF ~ "[a-c]") print}'
3,Selma Cooper,97455,20090405 16:31:00,1000,9.99,9990,Pre-Approach

PS C:\Scripts> Get-Content .\test.csv | %{ if ($_.Split(',')[-1] -match "[a-c]") { $_; } }
3,Selma Cooper,97455,20090405 16:31:00,1000,9.99,9990,Pre-Approach