Awk is a command-line utility that allows you to perform operations on a stream of text data, such as extracting and transforming the contents of a file or generating reports from data. It is particularly useful for working with structured data, such as tab-separated values (TSV) or comma-separated values (CSV). Below is a brief overview of how awk works:  Awk reads input one line at a time and splits each line into fields based on a predefined separator (by default, this is a whitespace character).  The fields can then be accessed and manipulated using special variables (e.g., $1 refers to the first field, $2 to the second field, etc.).  awk processes each line according to a set of rules, which specify the actions to be taken based on the contents of the fields.  The modified lines are then printed to the output.  Here is an example of using awk to print the second and fifth fields of a file containing tab-separated values:  //code
awk -F'\ ' '{print $2, $5}' input.txt > output.txt This command reads the contents of input.txt, sets the field separator to a tab character (-F'\ '), and then prints the second and fifth fields of each line to output.txt.  Awk is a very powerful and versatile utility, and there are many additional commands and options available for performing more complex operations.   Practice more Shell Scripting interview questions and answers like this to make a lasting impression on your recruiters.