Table of Contents for
sed & awk, 2nd Edition

Version ebook / Retour

Cover image for bash Cookbook, 2nd Edition sed & awk, 2nd Edition by Arnold Robbins Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc., 1997
  1. sed & awk, 2nd Edition
  2. Cover
  3. sed & awk, 2nd Edition
  4. A Note Regarding Supplemental Files
  5. Dedication
  6. Preface
  7. Scope of This Handbook
  8. Availability of sed and awk
  9. Obtaining Example Source Code
  10. Conventions Used in This Handbook
  11. About the Second Edition
  12. Acknowledgments from the First Edition
  13. Comments and Questions
  14. 1. Power Tools for Editing
  15. 1.1. May You Solve Interesting Problems
  16. 1.2. A Stream Editor
  17. 1.3. A Pattern-Matching Programming Language
  18. 1.4. Four Hurdles to Mastering sed and awk
  19. 2. Understanding Basic Operations
  20. 2.1. Awk, by Sed and Grep, out of Ed
  21. 2.2. Command-Line Syntax
  22. 2.3. Using sed
  23. 2.4. Using awk
  24. 2.5. Using sed and awk Together
  25. 3. Understanding Regular Expression Syntax
  26. 3.1. That’s an Expression
  27. 3.2. A Line-Up of Characters
  28. 3.3. I Never Metacharacter I Didn’t Like
  29. 4. Writing sed Scripts
  30. 4.1. Applying Commands in a Script
  31. 4.2. A Global Perspective on Addressing
  32. 4.3. Testing and Saving Output
  33. 4.4. Four Types of sed Scripts
  34. 4.5. Getting to the PromiSed Land
  35. 5. Basic sed Commands
  36. 5.1. About the Syntax of sed Commands
  37. 5.2. Comment
  38. 5.3. Substitution
  39. 5.4. Delete
  40. 5.5. Append, Insert, and Change
  41. 5.6. List
  42. 5.7. Transform
  43. 5.8. Print
  44. 5.9. Print Line Number
  45. 5.10. Next
  46. 5.11. Reading and Writing Files
  47. 5.12. Quit
  48. 6. Advanced sed Commands
  49. 6.1. Multiline Pattern Space
  50. 6.2. A Case for Study
  51. 6.3. Hold That Line
  52. 6.4. Advanced Flow Control Commands
  53. 6.5. To Join a Phrase
  54. 7. Writing Scripts for awk
  55. 7.1. Playing the Game
  56. 7.2. Hello, World
  57. 7.3. Awk’s Programming Model
  58. 7.4. Pattern Matching
  59. 7.5. Records and Fields
  60. 7.6. Expressions
  61. 7.7. System Variables
  62. 7.8. Relational and Boolean Operators
  63. 7.9. Formatted Printing
  64. 7.10. Passing Parameters Into a Script
  65. 7.11. Information Retrieval
  66. 8. Conditionals, Loops, and Arrays
  67. 8.1. Conditional Statements
  68. 8.2. Looping
  69. 8.3. Other Statements That Affect Flow Control
  70. 8.4. Arrays
  71. 8.5. An Acronym Processor
  72. 8.6. System Variables That Are Arrays
  73. 9. Functions
  74. 9.1. Arithmetic Functions
  75. 9.2. String Functions
  76. 9.3. Writing Your Own Functions
  77. 10. The Bottom Drawer
  78. 10.1. The getline Function
  79. 10.2. The close( ) Function
  80. 10.3. The system( ) Function
  81. 10.4. A Menu-Based Command Generator
  82. 10.5. Directing Output to Files and Pipes
  83. 10.6. Generating Columnar Reports
  84. 10.7. Debugging
  85. 10.8. Limitations
  86. 10.9. Invoking awk Using the #! Syntax
  87. 11. A Flock of awks
  88. 11.1. Original awk
  89. 11.2. Freely Available awks
  90. 11.3. Commercial awks
  91. 11.4. Epilogue
  92. 12. Full-Featured Applications
  93. 12.1. An Interactive Spelling Checker
  94. 12.2. Generating a Formatted Index
  95. 12.3. Spare Details of the masterindex Program
  96. 13. A Miscellany of Scripts
  97. 13.1. uutot.awk—Report UUCP Statistics
  98. 13.2. phonebill—Track Phone Usage
  99. 13.3. combine—Extract Multipart uuencoded Binaries
  100. 13.4. mailavg—Check Size of Mailboxes
  101. 13.5. adj—Adjust Lines for Text Files
  102. 13.6. readsource—Format Program Source Files for troff
  103. 13.7. gent—Get a termcap Entry
  104. 13.8. plpr—lpr Preprocessor
  105. 13.9. transpose—Perform a Matrix Transposition
  106. 13.10. m1—Simple Macro Processor
  107. A. Quick Reference for sed
  108. A.1. Command-Line Syntax
  109. A.2. Syntax of sed Commands
  110. A.3. Command Summary for sed
  111. B. Quick Reference for awk
  112. B.1. Command-Line Syntax
  113. B.2. Language Summary for awk
  114. B.3. Command Summary for awk
  115. C. Supplement for Chapter 12
  116. C.1. Full Listing of spellcheck.awk
  117. C.2. Listing of masterindex Shell Script
  118. C.3. Documentation for masterindex
  119. masterindex
  120. C.3.1. Background Details
  121. C.3.2. Coding Index Entries
  122. C.3.3. Output Format
  123. C.3.4. Compiling a Master Index
  124. Index
  125. About the Authors
  126. Colophon
  127. Copyright

Four Hurdles to Mastering sed and awk

There are a number of introductory UNIX books that will acquaint you with sed and awk. The goal of this book is to take you much further—to help you master sed and awk and to reduce the amount of time and effort that it takes you to reach that goal.

There are four hurdles on the way to mastering sed and awk. You must learn:

  1. How to use sed and awk. This is a relatively low hurdle to clear because, fortunately, sed and awk work in a very similar manner, based on the line editor ed. Chapter 2, covers the mechanics of using sed and awk.

  2. To apply UNIX regular expression syntax. Using UNIX regular expression syntax for pattern matching is common to both sed and awk, and many other UNIX programs. This can be a difficult hurdle for two reasons: the syntax is arcane, and though many people have some experience using regular expressions, few have persevered to master the complete syntax. The more facile you are in using this syntax, the easier sed and awk are to use. That is why we spend a good deal of time covering regular expressions in Chapter 3.

  3. How to interact with the shell. While not directly related to sed and awk themselves, managing the interaction with the command shell is often a frustrating problem, since the shell shares a number of special characters with both programs. If you can, avoid the problem by putting your script in a separate file. If not, use a Bourne-compatible shell for your scripts (the quoting rules are more straightforward), and use single quotes to contain your script. If you are using csh as your interactive shell, remember to escape any exclamation points with a backslash (“\!”). There is no other way to get csh to leave the exclamation point alone.[3]

  4. The knack of script writing. This is the most difficult, rather like a series of high hurdles. Because of this, the bulk of the book is devoted to script writing. With sed, you have to learn a set of single-letter commands. With awk, you have to learn the statements of a programming language. To get the knack of script writing, though, you simply must pore over lots of examples and, of course, must try your hand at writing scripts yourself.

If you were running the high hurdles, the ability to clear the hurdles does not win the race—clearing them swiftly does. In writing scripts, learning the scripting command set or language is simply clearing the hurdle. Acquiring the ability to attack interesting problems with your scripts is running fast enough to compete.


[3] Well, you can set the histchars variable. See the csh man page.