sed & awk

By Dale Dougherty
First Edition   
Pages: 414
ISBN 10: 0-937175-59-5 | ISBN 13: 9780937175590

This book has been updated—the edition you're requesting is OUT OF PRINT. Please visit the catalog page of the latest edition.

The latest edition is also available on Safari Books Online.

Book description

For people who create and modify text files, sed and awk are power tools for editing. Most of the things that you can do with these programs can be done interactively with a text editor; however, using sed and awk can save many hours of repetitive work in achieving the same result.
Full Description

For people who create and modify text files, sed and awk are power tools for editing. Most of the things that you can do with these programs can be done interactively with a text editor. However, using sed and awk can save many hours of repetitive work in achieving the same result. To master sed and awk you must thoroughly understand UNIX regular expressions, and understand the syntax of sed and awk commands. This handbook treats regular expressions as a foundation for learning about sed and awk and contains a comprehensive treatment of sed and awk syntax. It emphasizes the kinds of practical problems that sed and awk can help users to solve, with many useful example scripts and programs. Contents include:
  • A tutorial showing basic operations of sed and awk
  • Regular expression syntax and examples
  • Basic and advanced sed commands
  • Features of awk (plus gawk and nawk)
  • Common programming constructs
  • Advanced topics
  • User-contributed scripts

Browse within this book

Cover | Table of Contents | Index | Colophon


Featured customer reviews

Be the first person to review this book!

Write a Review

Media reviews "Most scripts written by system administrators to run UNIX systems involve sed. You can't really administer the system adequately if you can't read system scripts, so just learning how to read sed will help you understand vital system scripts like rc.

"Since understanding system scripts is so important for system administrators, you would think that there would be more books on sed, but there are only bits and pieces in a few books. [T]here has never been a book that gave sed more than a few pages. As for that, how many books have you ever seen on awk aside from a small volume called the AWK Programming Language by Aho, Kernighan and Weinberger? System administrators frequently use awk. Since awk is a pattern-matching language, it is perfect for applications requiring filtering with programming constructs.

"So where can system administrators turn to find the information they need on important topics like awk and sed?

Read all reviews

See larger cover