sed & awk

Fatbrain Review Serious UNIX programmers and administrators will enjoy the second edition of this best-selling book on a set of the most popular UNIX utilities, sed and awk. Why? Because it covers awk as described by the POSIX standard as well as NetBSD, FreeBSD, and the Linux versions of awk. The journey begins with an overview of the basic operations of sed and awk, showing a progression in functionality from grep to sed to awk. The next stop is writing sed scripts. You'll learn the syntax of sed commands, and advanced features, including multiple pattern space and hold space commands.

The book then moves to writing scripts for awk. Discussions include pattern matching, expressions, relational and Boolean operators, and informal retrieval. The text also explains awk's built-in functions and user-defined functions. The authors keep you learn by outlining the development of an index processing application, and they offer the readers contact information on how to obtain various versions of awk. This tutorial includes a miscellany of sed and awk scripting styles and techniques.