book

The AWK Programming Language, 2nd Edition

by Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan, Peter J. Weinberger

September 2023

Intermediate to advanced

240 pages

7h 40m

English

Addison-Wesley Professional

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Organization of the BookThe ExamplesEvolution of AwkAcknowledgmentsAcknowledgments for the First Edition
1.1 Getting Started1.2 Simple Output1.3 Formatted Output1.4 Selection1.5 Computing with Awk1.6 Control-Flow Statements1.7 Arrays1.8 Useful One-liners1.9 What Next?
2.1 Personal Computation2.2 Selection2.3 Transformation2.4 Summarization2.5 Personal Databases2.6 A Personal Library2.7 Summary

3.1 The Sinking of the Titanic3.2 Beer Ratings3.3 Grouping Data3.4 Unicode Data3.5 Basic Graphs and Charts3.6 Summary
4.1 Data Transformation and Reduction4.2 Data Validation4.3 Bundle and Unbundle4.4 Multiline Records4.5 Summary
5.1 Generating Reports5.2 Packaged Queries and Reports5.3 A Relational Database System5.4 Summary
6.1 Random Text Generation6.2 Interactive Text-Manipulation6.3 Text Processing6.4 Making an Index6.5 Summary
7.1 An Assembler and Interpreter7.2 A Language for Drawing Graphs7.3 A Sort Generator7.4 A Reverse-Polish Calculator7.5 A Different Approach7.6 A Recursive-Descent Parser for Arithmetic Expressions7.7 A Recursive-Descent Parser for a Subset of Awk7.8 Summary
8.1 Sorting8.2 Profiling8.3 Topological Sorting8.4 Make: A File Updating Program8.5 Summary
9.1 Awk as a Language9.2 Performance9.3 Conclusion
A.1 PatternsA.2 ActionsA.3 User-Defined FunctionsA.4 OutputA.5 InputA.6 Interaction with Other ProgramsA.7 Summary

Content preview from The AWK Programming Language, 2nd Edition

Preface

Awk was created in 1977 as a simple programming language for writing short programs that manipulate text and numbers with equal ease. It was meant as a scripting language to complement and work well with Unix tools, following the Unix philosophy of having each program do one thing well and be composable with other programs.

The computing world today is enormously different from what it was in 1977. Computers are thousands of times faster and have a million times as much memory. Software is different too, with a rich variety of programming languages and computing environments. The Internet has given us more data to process, and it comes from all over the world. We’re no longer limited to the 26 letters of English either; thanks to Unicode, ...