sed and awk Pocket Reference, 2nd Edition [Paperback]

Arnold Robbins (Author)

Book Description

Series: Pocket Reference (O'Reilly) | Publication Date: June 2002

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 on:

• An overview of sed and awk?s command line syntax
• Alphabetical summaries of commands, including nawk and gawk
• Profiling with pgawk
• Coprocesses and sockets with gawk
• Internationalization with gawk
• A listing of resources for sed and awk users

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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Arnold Robbins, an Atlanta native, is a professional programmer and technical author. He has worked with Unix systems since 1980, when he was introduced to a PDP-11 running a version of Sixth Edition Unix. He has been a heavy AWK user since 1987, when he became involved with gawk, the GNU project's version of AWK. As a member of the POSIX 1003.2 balloting group, he helped shape the POSIX standard for AWK. He is currently the maintainer of gawk and its documentation. He is also coauthor of the sixth edition of O'Reilly's Learning the vi Editor. Since late 1997, he and his family have been living happily in Israel.

Product Details

• Paperback: 52 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 2nd edition (June 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596003528
• ISBN-13: 978-0596003524
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.3 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #197,300 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #11 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Computers & Internet > Programming
  • #23 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Computers & Internet > General

More About the Author

Arnold Robbins is a professional programmer, instructor, and author. A long-time GNU Project volunteer, he currently maintains gawk. He has worked with C, C++, Unix, and GNU/Linux since 1980.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars All you need to use sed or awk well., September 13, 2000

By 

Alex J. Avriette "Alex Avriette" (Arlington, Virginia USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: sed, awk and Regular Expressions Pocket Reference (Pocket Reference (O'Reilly)) (Mass Market Paperback)

I bought this "book" because I am writing a program that deals extensively with strings and text (natural language parsing). I was having some difficulty mastering sed, and understanding how it works. For example, "s/[^A-Za-z]//" was not working (to remove non alpha chars). After five pages in this little gem, I knew what I needed. A trailing "g".

The book is rich with examples, explanations, and really just cuts straight to the chase.

This is not a book for the casual user. It is, after all, a reference, not a tutorial. Unix users (and administrators) who already have a basic grasp of regular expressions and just what sed and awk are (and grep/egrep too) will find this most rewarding.

While I have a hard time paying this much for what amounts to less than toaster oven instructions, it is absolutely invaluable to me, and it doesnt take up space on my desk or bookshelf.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a must have, March 18, 2004

By 

Jeff Pike (Mechanicsville, VA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: sed and awk Pocket Reference, 2nd Edition (Paperback)

This little book is great. I've only had it for about a week. I needed to match some text today with a pattern that was a little bit more involved than my usual simple needs. I flipped through a few pages and found some examples that quickly helped me derive the search pattern I needed in a few minutes.

I have the full "sed & awk" second edition book, but I went to the pocket reference instead. I would not have been able to find what I needed in the larger book as quickly.

Some have complained about some of the pocket references lacking indexes. This one doesn't have one, but it's so easy to use that it doesn't need one. Just flip and few pages and you'll find what you need. As far as I'm concerned time is money. This little book has paid for itself in one weeks use.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A super fast lightweight reference, December 19, 2000

By 

Bruce D. Meyer (Elgin, SC United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: sed, awk and Regular Expressions Pocket Reference (Pocket Reference (O'Reilly)) (Mass Market Paperback)

I use this pocket reference more then any other reference for sed and awk. This is mostly a syntax guide for folks who already know sed and awk. If you don't know sed and awk, get the Ellen Quigleys 'Unix Shells'(for beginners) followed by O'Reillies 'Sed and Awk' reference. (Big book.) I tend to forget exactly how to do something, so I will just quickly look at my bookmarked pocket reference, and flip quickly to an example of syntax to get that bash code going correctly. If your desk has as many papers and books on it as mine, this is nice for freeing up some elbow room, while keeping the big books on the bookshelf most of the time.