Effective awk Programming: Universal Text Processing and Pattern Matching

by Arnold Robbins

When processing text files, the awk language is ideal for handling data extraction, reporting, and data-reformatting jobs. This practical guide serves as both a reference and tutorial for POSIX-standard awk and for the GNU implementation, called gawk. This book is useful for novices and awk experts alike.

In this thoroughly revised edition, author and gawk lead developer Arnold Robbins describes the awk language and gawk program in detail, shows you how to use awk and gawk for problem solving, and then dives into specific features of gawk. System administrators, programmers, webmasters, and other power users will find everything they need to know about awk and gawk. You will learn how

Format text and use regular expressions in awk and gawkProcess data using awk's operators and built-in functionsManage data relationships using associative arraysDefine your own functions"Think in awk" with two full chapters of sample functions and programsTake advantage of gawk's many advanced featuresDebug awk programs with the gawk built-in debuggerExtend gawk by writing new functions in C or C++This book is published under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. You have the freedom to copy and modify this GNU manual.

Royalties from the sales of this book go to the Free Software Foundation and to the author.

Genres: Programming, Computers, Reference, Technology, Nonfiction, Computer Science

785 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 1, 1997

Reviews

[Alvaro Tejada Galindo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book because I need to write some scripts for work...despite being pretty old, AWK is an awesome language and this book is full of really nice examples that guide through the process of learning it the right way...I enjoyed reading it and while I'm not by any means an AWK expert...I feel pretty confident on writing useful scripts...so I believe that this book really paid off -:)

[Jose Manuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Muy buena guía al lenguaje awk.