SED & AWK 2e: UNIX Power Tools (In a Nutshell) - Softcover

Dougherty, Dale; Robbins, Arnold

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1565922255 ISBN 13: 9781565922259

Publisher: O′Reilly, 1997

Synopsis

Explains the progression in Unix from grep to sed and awk, describes how to write sed scripts, covers common programming constructs, and details awk's built-in functions

About this title

About the Author

Dale Dougherty is president and CEO of Songline Studios, a leading web publishing company. He is editor and publisher of Web Review (webreview.com), an innovative online magazine for web site developers. Prior to Songline, Dougherty developed the Global Network Navigator (GNN) and was the founding editor for O'Reilly's Nutshell Handbooks (R). Arnold Robbins, an Atlanta native, is a professional programmer and technical author. He has been working with UNIX systems since 1980, when he was intoduced to a PDP-11 running a version of Sixth Edition UNIX. He has been a heavy awk user since 1987, when he became involved with gawk, the GNU project's version of awk. As a member of the POSIX 1003.2 balloting group, he helped shape the POSIX standard for awk. He is currently the maintainer of gawk and its documentation. The documentation is available from the Free Software Foundation (http://www.gnu.org) and has also been published by SSC (http://www.ssc.com) as "Effective AWK Programming." He is also co-author of the sixth edition of O'Reilly's Learning the vi Editor. Since late 1997, he and his family have been living happily in Israel.

From the Back Cover

The book begins with an overview and a tutorial that demonstrate a progression in functionality from grep to sed to awk. sed and awk share a similar command-line syntax, accepting user instructions in the form of a script. Because all three programs use UNIX regular expressions, an entire chapter is devoted to understanding UNIX regular expression syntax. Next, the book describes how to write sed scripts. After getting started by writing a few simple scripts, you'll learn other basic commands that parallel manual editing actions, as well as advanced commands that introduce simple programming constructs. Among the advanced commands are those that manipulate the hold space, a set-aside temporary buffer. The second part of the book has been extensively revised to include POSIX awk as well as coverage of three freely available and three commercial versions of awk. The book introduces the primary features of the awk language and how to write simple scripts. You'll also learn: common programming constructs; how to use awk's built-in functions; how to write user-defined functions; debugging techniques for awk programs; how to develop an application that processes an index, demonstrating much of the power of awk; and FTP and contact information for obtaining various versions of awk. Also included is a miscellany of user-contributed scripts that demonstrate a wide range of sed and awk scripting styles and techniques.|

The book begins with an overview and a tutorial that demonstrate a progression in functionality from grep to sed to awk. sed and awk share a similar command-line syntax, accepting user instructions in the form of a script. Because all three programs use UNIX regular expressions, an entire chapter is devoted to understanding UNIX regular expression syntax. Next, the book describes how to write sed scripts. After getting started by writing a few simple scripts, you'll learn other basic commands that parallel manual editing actions, as well as advanced commands that introduce simple programming constructs. Among the advanced commands are those that manipulate the hold space, a set-aside temporary buffer. The second part of the book has been extensively revised to include POSIX awk as well as coverage of three freely available and three commercial versions of awk. The book introduces the primary features of the awk language and how to write simple scripts. You'll also learn: common programming constructs; how to use awk's built-in functions; how to write user-defined functions; debugging techniques for awk programs; how to develop an application that processes an index, demonstrating much of the power of awk; and FTP and contact information for obtaining various versions of awk. Also included is a miscellany of user-contributed scripts that demonstrate a wide range of sed and awk scripting styles and techniques.

Edition details

• Publisher: O′Reilly
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1565922255
• ISBN 13: 9781565922259
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 407