For people who create and modify text files, sed and awk are power tools for editing. Most of the things that you can do with these programs can be done interactively with a text editor. However, using sed and awk can save many hours of repetitive work in achieving the same result.
To master sed and awk you must thoroughly understand UNIX regular expressions, and understand the syntax of sed and awk commands. This handbook treats regular expressions as a foundation for learning aboutsed and awk and contains a comprehensive treatment of sed and awk syntax. It emphasizes the kinds of practical problems that sed and awk can help users to solve, with many useful example scripts and programs.
Contents include:
A tutorial showing basic operations of sed and awk
Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The animal featured on the cover of sed & awk is a slender loris. Lorises are nocturnal, tree-dwelling, tailless primates with thick, soft fur and large round eyes. They are found in India and Sri Lanka where they live in the trees, rarely descending to the ground. Lorises have been observed urinating on their hands and feet--it is thought that they do this to improve their grip while climbing or to leave a scent trail. A small animal, the slender loris is generally between 7 and 10 inches in size and weighs 12 ounces or less. It subsists on a diet of fruit, leaves and shoots, and small animals which it captures by hand. UNIX and its attendant programs can be unruly beasts. Nutshell Handbooks(R) help you tame them.
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Edie Freedman designed this cover and the entire UNIX bestiary that appears on other Nutshell Handbooks. The beasts themselves are adapted from 19th-century engravings from the Dover Pictorial Archive.
The text of this book is set in Times Roman; headings are Helvetica; examples are Courier. Text was prepared using SortQuad's sqtroff text formatter. Figures are produced with a Macintosh. Printing is done on an Apple LaserWriter.
