Chapter 18
Introducing sed and gawk
In This Chapter
- Text manipulation
- The sed editor basics
By far, one of the most common functions that people use shell scripts for is to work with text files. Between examining log files, reading configuration files, and handling data elements, shell scripts can help automate the mundane tasks of manipulating any type of data contained in text files. However, trying to manipulate the contents of text files using just shell script commands can be somewhat awkward. If you perform any type of data manipulation in your shell scripts, you'll want to become familiar with the sed and gawk tools available in Linux. These tools can greatly simplify any data-handling tasks you need to perform.
Text Manipulation
Chapter 9 showed you how to edit text files using different editor programs available in the Linux environment. These editors enable you to easily manipulate text contained in a text file by using simple commands or mouse clicks.
There are times, however, when you'll find yourself wanting to manipulate text in a text file on the fly, without having to pull out a full-fledged interactive text editor. In these situations, it would be useful to have a simple command line editor that could easily format, insert, modify, or delete text elements automatically.
The Linux system provides two common tools for doing just that. This section describes the two most popular command line editors used in the Linux world, sed and gawk.
The sed Editor
The sed ...
