ambar@ora.ora.com (Jean Marie Diaz) (10/10/90)
sed and awk are tools used by for users, programmers and
administrators. sed, so called because it is a Stream EDitor, is
perfect for applying a series of edits to a number of files. awk,
named after its developers Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan, is a
programming language that permits easy manipulation of structure data
and the generation of formatted reports.
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
these programs can save many hours of repetitive work in achieving the
same result.
There are two separate hurdles involved in becoming a master of sed
and awk: 1) really mastering UNIX regular expressions and learning to
think with them and 2) mastering the syntax of sed and awk commands.
The sed & awk Nutshell Handbook separates these two topics and treats
regular expressions as a foundation for learning about sed and awk.
The material on regular expressions will be helpful to anyone who uses
a UNIX text editor. This book takes users from the familiar world of
grep through simple editing substitutions, to serious sed scripts and
even more serious awk programming. The handbook emphasizes the kinds
of practical problems that sed and awk can help users to solve, with
many useful example scripts and programs.
Contents include:
- Tutorial showing basic operations of grep, sed & awk
- UNIX 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
The book will be available November 5. Early copies will be available
at our UNIX Expo booth in NYC in the end of October. We are giving a
Sed & Awk t-shirt to the first 700 purchasers of the book. The
t-shirt is white, heavy cotton with the graphic from the front of the
book, the title "sed & awk" and two slender lorises (nocturnal
lemurs).
The author, Dale Dougherty, is an editor and writer for O'Reilly &
Associates, Inc. He has either conceptualized, written or edited many
of the books published by O'Reilly. Among other books, Dale has
written UNIX Text Processing (with Tim O'Reilly), UNIX in a Nutshell
for HyperCard , DOS Meets UNIX (with Tim O'Reilly), Using UUCP &
Usenet (with Grace Todino), and Guide to the Pick System.
ISBN # 0-937175-59-5, approx. 200 pages, $24.95
O'Reilly & Associates Inc.,
632 Petaluma Avenue, Sebastopol CA 95472
(800) 338-6887, FAX (707) 829-0104, overseas/local (707) 829-0515