Effective awk Programming Universal Text Processing and Pattern Matching [Paperback]

When processing text files, theawklanguage is ideal for handling data extraction, reporting, and data-reformatting jobs. This practical guide serves as both a reference and tutorial for POSIX-standardawkand for the GNU implementation, calledgawk. This book is useful for novices andawkexperts alike.

In this thoroughly revised edition, author andgawklead developer Arnold Robbins describes theawklanguage andgawkprogram in detail, shows you how to useawkandgawkfor problem solving, and then dives into specific features ofgawk. System administrators, programmers, webmasters, and other power users will find everything they need to know aboutawkandgawk. You will learn how to:

• Format text and use regular expressions inawkandgawk
• Process data usingawk's operators and built-in functions
• Manage data relationships using associative arrays
• Define your own functions
• Think inawk with two full chapters of sample functions and programs
• Take advantage ofgawk's many advanced features
• Debugawkprograms with thegawkbuilt-in debugger
• Extendgawkby 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.

Arnold Robbins is a professional programmer and technical author who has worked with Unix systems since 1980 and has been using AWK since 1987. As a member of the POSIX 1003.2 balloting group, he helped shape the POSIX standard for AWK. Arnold is currently the maintainer of gawk and its documentation. He is coauthor of the sixth edition of O'Reilly's Learning the vi Editor.