Effective awk Programming

By Diane Zak

Effective awk Programming, 3rd Edition, focuses entirely on awk, exploring it in the greatest depth of the three awk titles we carry. It's an excellent companion piece to the more broadly focused second edition. This book provides complete coverage of the gawk 3.1 language as well as the most up-to-date coverage of the POSIX standard for awk available anywhere. Author Arnold Robbins clearly distinguishes standard awk features from GNU awk (gawk)-specific features, shines light into many of the "dark corners" of the language (areas to watch out for when programming), and devotes two full chapters to example programs. A brand new chapter is devoted to TCP/IP networking with gawk. He includes a summary of how the awk language evolved. The book also covers: Internationalization of gawk Interfacing to i18n at the awk level Two-way pipes TCP/IP networking via the two-way pipe interface The new PROCINFO array, which provides information about running gawk Profiling and pretty-printing awk programs In addition to covering the awk language, this book serves as the official "User's Guide" for the GNU implementation of awk (gawk), describing in an integrated fashion the extensions available to the System V Release 4 version of awk that are also available in gawk. As the official gawk User's Guide, this book will also be available electronically, and can be freely copied and distributed under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's Free Documentation License (FDL). A portion of the proceeds from sales of this book will go to the Free Software Foundation to support further development of free and open source software. The third edition of Effective awk Programming is a GNU Manual and is published by O'Reilly & Associates under the Free Software Foundation's Free Documentation License (FDL). A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book is donated to the Free Software Foundation to further development of GNU software. This book is also available in electronic form; you have the freedom to modify this GNU Manual, like GNU software. Copies published by the Free Software Foundation raise funds for GNU development.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596000707
• ISBN13: 9780596000707
• Release Date: June 2001
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Old Reliable AWK

Every once in a while I am told to panic and get something done in an unreasonable amount of time. When the "something" involves text processing I sometimes return to AWK, and last night it saved my bacon once again. This book has never quite given me the sort of reader experience I'd hoped for, but it does get the job done and can help you do the same.

Excellent tutorial & reference that zeroes in on awk

This book explains both the awk language and how to run the awk utility. You should already be familiar with basic system commands, such as cat and ls, as well as basic shell facilities, such as input/output redirection and pipes. This book describes the awk language in general and also the particular implementation of awk called gawk. gawk runs on a broad range of Unix systems and has also been ported to Mac OS X, MS-DOS,...

This book is an essential for people writing unix scripts and doing system administration

Awk is a powerful tool to perform search, and pattern matching on the strings/files. This book is an essential for people writing unix scripts and doing system administration. It gives you insight on how things work, and has very nice examples and tricks to perform the tasks. Mostly the majority of the tasks are covered in the beginning, and the deep rooted tasks, are covered in the later chapters.

Most Complete Coverage of Awk

Awk is one of those handy Unix tools with which you can easily impress people. Using a simple/pattern/ { action }syntax, you can construct powerful one-liners. Do you want to how much time in total you spent surfing the Internet? Here it is:awk '/Connect time/ { s += $8 } END { print s }' /var/log/messagesIt doesn't get much shorter in any other programming language, does it? Need to strip text of HTML tags? Need a frequency...

awk programming

This book is being picked up by the O'Reilly people. I have many of the O'Reilly books on my book shelf. There will be a third edition due out in July with Robbins as the author. I read though this book and thought it as good or better than the "Sed & awk" book that O'Reilly presently has out. Robbins is also an author on this book. I thought the book to be better than the "AWK programming language" by Aho, Kerninghan and...