There are a few options under Gentoo gawk (default GNU awk), mawk (often faster than gawk) or nawk. They mostly all work the same. Tons of tutorials out there and it really depends on what you want to get done, a simple-ish overview and good guide is Steve's Awk Acadamy.

If you want to sort a file or list based on a particular column you can place the desired column at the start, pipe to sort and then remove the column

snippet.bash

awk -F, '{ print $3, $0 }' user.csv | sort | sed 's/^.* //'

Alternatively you can use sort directly…

snippet.bash

sort -t, -nk3 user.csv

snippet.bash

# Print the 12th column ('{print $12}') of a comma separated file (-F,) called my_file.csv
awk -F, '{print $12}' my_file.csv
# As above but for multiple files and include the filename (FILENAME)
awk -F, '{print FILENAME,$12}' *.csv

snippet.bash

# Search for two delimiters (can be regular expressions, hence escaping the period)
awk -F'.|,' '{print $1 "\t" $13}' my_file.csv 

Source

snippet.bash

awk -F $'\t' ' { t = $1; $1 = $2; $2 = t; print; } ' OFS=$'\t' input_file

snippet.bash

cat foo.txt | awk '{SUM+=$3} END {print SUM/NR}'

• @bork awk
• awk One-Liners Explained (Part One)
• awk One-Liners Explained (Part Two)
• awk One-Liners Explained (Part Three)
• awk One-Liners Explained (Bonus)
• The GNU Awk User’s Guide

• Running Awk in parallel to process 256M records