sed and awk Pocket Reference, 2nd Edition

by Arnold Robbins

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, Second Edition, Unix in a Nutshell, Third Edition , and Effective awk Programming, Third Edition . This new edition has expanded coverage of gawk (GNU awk), and includes sections This small book is a handy reference guide to the information presented in the larger volumes. It presents a concise summary of regular expressions and pattern matching, and summaries of sed and awk.

Arnold Robbins, an Atlanta native now happily living in Israel, is a professional programmer and technical author and coauthor of various O'Reilly Unix titles. He has been working with Unix systems since 1980, and currently maintains gawk and its documentation.

Genres: Reference, Programming, Computers, Technical, Software, Technology, Coding

52 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Ravi Sinha · Rating 2 out of 5]

I should have gone for the other, bigger, real-er books on the subject. I understand it's a pocket reference, and I appreciate the effort, but it's not a very self contained piece of work because it severely lacks examples. As such, I couldn't get much out of this little book other than motivation to read the other books because sed and awk are powerful. A pocket reference _with examples_ would have been much more appreciated.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Useful reference

[Andy Airey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could use more examples for sed.
Good coverage on gawk, though.

[Seth Kenlon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been using sed for quite some time, but only barely. This book has a ton of really good, very detailed tips on sed. The most revealing thing, I think, is its great explanation of how a sed command is structured. I think most Unix users get introduced to the 's/foo/bar/g' incantation of sed pletty early on, and that 10% of sed's capabilities covers about 90% of what most of us ever need to do with it. But learning more and *practising* it (that, most importantly) can make sed something that you use a lot more than you ever thought possible.

Seriously, I use sed to make site-wide changes in websites, I use it to edit text, to strike or comment out options from config files, and more. It takes practise, and I think this book could have used a cheatsheet tear-out in the back, but hey that's what the internet is for.

As for the {g,n}awk section, it is just as good as the sed portion and maybe, for me, even better, simply because I had not ever dared construct an awk command before. So it was pretty satisfying for me when I finally had enough understanding of awk and actually encountered a clear and present need to use it, and was able to successfullf integrate it in a shell script. Could I have done the same thing with cut? well, yes...but one has to start somewhere!

All in all, this is a great book, although I do find the lumping in of sed with awk a strange choice. I think maybe it would have been better to keep them as either separate books or to at least split the volume down the middle, keeping sed and awk completely separate from one another. Not a big deal, just something I found odd.

If you're writing lots of scripts and want to boost your efficiency, or are just curious about these revered Unix tools, this book is a must.

[Dp4s]

unix

[Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nützlich, aber leider nicht so sehr wie andere Bände der Reihe. Das hätte gern noch dicker sein dürfen.