sed & awk, 2nd Edition

Scope of This Handbook

Chapter 1, Power Tools for Editing, is an overview of the features and capabilities of sed and awk.

Chapter 2, Understanding Basic Operations, demonstrates the basic operations of sed and awk, showing a progression in functionality from sed to awk. Both share a similar command-line syntax, accepting user instructions in the form of a script.

Chapter 3, Understanding Regular Expression Syntax, describes UNIX regular expression syntax in full detail. New users are often intimidated by these strange expressions, used for pattern matching. It is important to master regular expression syntax to get the most from sed and awk. The pattern-matching examples in this chapter largely rely on grep and egrep.

Chapter 4, Writing sed Scripts, begins a three-chapter section on sed. This chapter covers the basic elements of writing a sed script using only a few sed commands. It also presents a shell script that simplifies invoking sed scripts.

Chapter 5, Basic sed Commands, and Chapter 6, Advanced sed Commands, divide the sed command set into basic and advanced commands. The basic commands are commands that parallel manual editing actions, while the advanced commands introduce simple programming capabilities. Among the advanced commands are those that manipulate the hold space, a set-aside temporary buffer.

Chapter 7, Writing Scripts for awk, begins a five-chapter section on awk. This chapter presents the primary features of this scripting language. A number of scripts are explained, ...