For people who create and modify text files, sed and awk are power tools for editing. sed, awk, and regular expressions allow programmers and system administrators to automate editing tasks that need to be performed on one or more files, to simplify the task of performing the same edits on multiple files, and to write conversion programs.
The sed & awk Pocket Reference is a companion volume to sed & awk and Unix in a Nutshell. This small book is a handy reference guide to the information the larger volumes, presenting a concise summary of regular expressions and pattern matching, and summaries of sed and awk.
Arnold Robbins, an Atlanta native, is a professional programmer and technical author. He has worked with Unix systems since 1980, when he was introduced to a PDP-11 running a version of Sixth Edition Unix. He has been a heavy AWK user since 1987, when he became involved with gawk, the GNU project's version of AWK. As a member of the POSIX 1003.2 balloting group, he helped shape the POSIX standard for AWK. He is currently the maintainer of gawk and its documentation. He is also coauthor of the sixth edition of O'Reilly's Learning the vi Editor. Since late 1997, he and his family have been living happily in Israel.
