String Comparison in Awk

Name: String Comparison in Awk
Uploaded: 2026-09-30T17:48:23+00:00
Duration: 10 min 27 s
Description: I Need to Compare Two Strings in Alphabetic Order, Not Only Equality Test. I Want to Know Is There Way to Do String Comparison in Awk? 2 3 Answers Sure It Can...

Question

I need to compare two strings in alphabetic order, not only equality test. I want to know is there way to do string comparison in awk?

Accepted Answer

Sure it can:

pax$ echo 'hello
goodbye' | gawk '{if ($0 == "hello") {print "HELLO"}}'
HELLO

You can also do inequality (ordered) testing as well:

pax> printf 'aaa\naab\naac\naad\n' | gawk '{if ($1 < "aac"){print}}'
aaa
aab

Answer 2

You can do string comparison in awk using standard boolean operators, unlike in C where you would have to use strcmp().

echo "xxx yyy" > test.txt

cat test.txt | awk '$1!=$2 { print($1 $2); }'

Answer 3

You can check the answer in the nawk manual

echo aaa bbb | awk '{ print ($1 >= $2) ? "true" : "false" }'

String Comparison in Awk

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Robert Thorne

String Comparison in Awk

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Robert Thorne