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sed & awk (2nd Edition)

by Dale Dougherty, Arnold Robbins

List Price:$29.95
Average Rating:4.5 out of 5 stars
Lowest New Price:$26.06

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Editorial Reviews
Product Description
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 about sed 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
  • Regular expression syntax and examples
  • Basic and advanced sed commands
  • Features of awk (plus gawk and nawk)
  • Common programming constructs
  • Advanced topics
  • User-contributed scripts



All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:4.5 out of 5 stars
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

5 out of 5 starsa great little book, 2008-08-26
I found understanding/writing sed/awk commands/scripts a daunting task until I bought this book. This book empowers you. I rate it at par with "the vi editor" from same publisher


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

5 out of 5 starsCan Replace All of Your SED & AWK Bookmarks (2ndEd), 2008-08-13
This book is like a big tutorial series, packed with tons of applicable examples. It is not a reference, that's what the man pages are for, although the index if very good. In fact, the combination of the *BSD man pages and this book would give any man all the SED and AWK documentation he would ever need.

SED and AWK are these two very terse programs that, if you don't use them everyday, you tend to forget their syntax and functionality. I am not an everyday user. Before I bought this book, I often visited one of my many SED/AWK bookmarks. After years of using both programs, I never really understood them. I knew just enough to do small one-liners. However, I recently needed to build a fairly complex script to perform an automated OS upgrade via the network. I knew SED and AWK could help me accomplish my task, but I didn't have a full understanding of their potential. That's when I decided to buy this book. I have since then deleted all of my SED and AWK bookmarks.

After studying this book and highlighting the hell out of it, I have a clear understanding of these two tools and how to effectively utilize them.


0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5 out of 5 starsOld, but Ok for the porpurse, 2008-04-20
If you want understand all the sed advanced commands, this book is for you !

I recommend using perl instead sed or awk



1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4 out of 5 starsCome for the sed, stay for the awk!, 2008-02-16
This book is a timeless classic, the information on sed is invaluable to anyone who regularly works with text files or streams (after all sed is short for stream editor). Not only is it very informative it's also a fun and easy read... You'll be seeing uses for sed almost every day once you learn how powerful it can be!


The last 1/2 or so is on awk and although it's also very well written and informative it's not quite as useful if you're already experienced with a high level language with excellent text processing facilities like Python or Perl. However, it's work reading even if you keep thinking "I could do this in _____" because sometimes awk really is the right answer.


3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5 out of 5 starsAre you serious?, 2007-08-23
In a nutshell, if you don't have this book, you are probably not a serious programmer or system administrator.

Both sed and awk have been around for ages, and they are part of the fundamental toolkit of any Unix/Linux professional. Furthermore, there are versions available both for native Windows and for Linux-like environments under Windows (cygwin, MKS, mingw.)

If you are a Perl hacker, you probably use Perl for a lot of the tasks that would otherwise be performed with one of these tools. Nevertheless, they are worth your time.




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