Question

What is the default delimiter used by awk?

(a) tab

(b) whitespace

(c) double space

(d) |

This question was posed to me during an internship interview.

Query is from Various Operations using Awk Command topic in division Awk – An Advanced Filter & Perl – The Master Manipulator of Unix

Answer 1

Right choice is (b) whitespace

Best explanation: awk is the only filter which uses whitespace as the default delimiter instead of a single space or tab.