Reformat output

Aligned printf formatting with fixed column widths

awk '{printf "%-20s %5d\n", $1, $2}' data.txt

More awk commands

Run awk script from file

awk -f transform.awk input.txt

Load awk program from an external script file
In-place-style transform with awk

awk '{gsub(/foo/, "bar"); print}' input.txt > tmp && mv tmp input.txt

Global substitution and write back to same file
Process CSV with quotes (gawk)

gawk -v FPAT='([^,]+)|("[^"]+")' '{print $2}' data.csv

Parse quoted CSV fields correctly with FPAT in gawk
BEGIN/END blocks

awk 'BEGIN{print "Start"} {lines++} END{print lines" lines processed"}' file.txt

Run code before and after processing all lines
Two-file join on key

awk 'NR==FNR{a[$1]=$2; next} $1 in a {print $0, a[$1]}' lookup.txt data.txt

Left-join data.txt with lookup.txt on first field