SAMS Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours FOURTH EDITION

Chapter 9. Slicing and Dicing Command-Pipe Data

By this point, you've learned enough about Unix to be able to build quite sophisticated command-line pipes, sequences of standard commands that offer flexibility and power. You need to add a couple of key tools to your toolkit, however, and they're the focus of this lesson.

The first and most powerful of the tools is awk, a programming system built specifically to work with data streams. You can build very complex processing systems in awk, but in fact the most common awk programs are typically just a line or two long.

Adding to the explanation of awk will be three additional pipeline commands that you will doubtless find essential for your toolbox: sed, a stream editor; tr, a character mapping facility; ...