Sed & awk (2nd Edition) by Arnold Robbins, Dale Dougherty

By Arnold Robbins, Dale Dougherty

sed & awk describes textual content processing courses which are mainstays of the UNIX programmer's toolbox.

sed is a "stream editor" for modifying streams of textual content that may be too huge to edit as a unmarried dossier, or that would be generated at the fly as a part of a bigger info processing step. the most typical operation performed with sed is substitution, exchanging one block of textual content with another.

awk is an entire programming language. not like many traditional languages, awk is "data driven" -- you specify what sort of information you have an interest in and the operations to be played whilst that facts is stumbled on. awk does many stuff for you, together with immediately commencing and shutting facts records, examining documents, breaking the files up into fields, and counting the documents. whereas awk presents the positive factors of most traditional programming languages, it is usually a few unconventional positive factors, reminiscent of prolonged common expression matching and associative arrays. sed & awk describes either courses intimately and encompasses a bankruptcy of instance sed and awk scripts.

This variation covers positive aspects of sed and awk which are mandated through the POSIX average. This so much particularly impacts awk, the place POSIX standardized a brand new variable, CONVFMT, and new services, toupper() and tolower(). The CONVFMT variable specifies the conversion structure to take advantage of while changing numbers to strings (awk used to take advantage of OFMT for this purpose). The toupper() and tolower() features each one take a (presumably combined case) string argument and go back a brand new model of the string with all letters translated to the corresponding case.

In addition, this variation covers GNU sed, newly on hand because the first variation. It additionally updates the 1st version insurance of Bell Labs nawk and GNU awk (gawk), covers mawk, an extra freely on hand implementation of awk, and in short discusses 3 advertisement models of awk, MKS awk, Thompson Automation awk (tawk), and Videosoft (VSAwk).