Search and parse a field with Awk

I frequently need to do simple parsing. Often I resort to grep and cut, or a regular expression I send through Python. I rarely use something like awk.

I needed to look for a pattern in some text coming through a pipeline (“Configuration backup archive complete”), split that line up by colons, and print the second field. This is what I came up with:

| awk -F: '/Configuration backup archive complete/{print $2}'

• 24 August 2018
• • awk,
  • command line,
  • computers

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