sed & awk, 2nd Edition

May You Solve Interesting Problems

The primary motivation for learning sed and awk is that they are useful for devising general solutions to text editing problems.^[1] For some people, myself included, the satisfaction of solving a problem is the difference between work and drudgery. Given the choice of using vi or sed to make a series of repeated edits over a number of files, I will choose sed, simply because it makes the problem more interesting to me. I am refining a solution instead of repeating a series of keystrokes. Besides, once I accomplish my task, I congratulate myself on being clever. I feel like I have done a little bit of magic and spared myself some dull labor.

Initially, using sed and awk will seem like the long way to accomplish a task. After several attempts you may conclude that the task would have been easier to do manually. Be patient. You not only have to learn how to use sed and awk but you also need to learn to recognize situations where using them pays off. As you become more proficient, you will solve problems more quickly and solve a broader range of problems.

You will also begin to see opportunities to find general solutions to specific problems. There is a way of looking at a problem so you see it related to a class of problems. Then you can devise a solution that can be reused in other situations.

Let me give you an example (without showing any program code). One of our books used a cross-referencing naming scheme in which the reference was defined and ...