When it comes to command line text processing, from an abstract point of view, there are three major pillars — grep for filtering, sed for substitution and awk for field processing. These tools have some overlapping features too, for example, all three of them have extensive filtering capabilities.
Unlike grep and sed, awk is a full blown programming language. However, this book intends to showcase awk one-liners that can be composed from the command line instead of writing a program file.
This book heavily leans on examples to present options and features of awk one by one. It is recommended that you manually type each example and experiment with them. Understanding both the nature of sample input string and the output produced is essential.
Visit https://github.com/learnbyexample/lea... for code snippets and other related files used in the book.
An invaluable resource for learning awk. The author does a good job of showing examples and explaining how they work. I particularly like the exercises at the end of chapters, making it more of an interactive learning experience.