reordering and reformatting tab separated output:

    [pdurbin@beamish ~]$ echo -e "foo\tbar\tbaz" | awk -F'\t' '{printf("%s %s (%s)\n",$2, $3, $1)}'
    bar baz (foo)

    # sum the third column
    ./foo | awk '{sum+=$3} END {print sum}'

    #Print the last column
    #(The variable NF is set to the total number of fields in the input record.)
    ./foo | awk '{print $NF}'
    # use : as field separator
    ./foo | awk 'BEGIN {FS=":"}; {print $2,$1}'

    [root@flanders ~]# grep selinuxfs /proc/mounts
    none /selinux selinuxfs rw 0 0
    [root@flanders ~]# awk '/ selinuxfs / { print $2 }' /proc/mounts
    /selinux
    [root@flanders ~]#

    [root@beamish ~]# grep RHEL5 /etc/ghosts | awk '{print $5, $7}' | sort -u
    RHEL5 i686
    RHEL5 x86_64
    [root@beamish ~]#

    awk '{printf "%-30s %s\n", $1, $5 }'

http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Awk.html

http://www.pement.org/awk/awk1line.txt