Effective awk Programming: Universal Text Processing and Pattern Matching, 4th Edition

When processing text files, the awk language is ideal for handling data extraction, reporting, and data-reformatting jobs. This practical guide serves as both a reference and tutorial for POSIX-standard awk and for the GNU implementation, called gawk. This book is useful for novices and awk experts alike.

In this thoroughly revised edition, author and gawk lead developer Arnold Robbins describes the awk language and gawk program in detail, shows you how to use awk and gawk for problem solving, and then dives into specific features of gawk. System administrators, programmers, webmasters, and other power users will find everything they need to know about awk and gawk. You will learn how to:

• Format text and use regular expressions in awk and gawk
• Process data using awk‘s operators and built-in functions
• Manage data relationships using associative arrays
• Define your own functions
• “Think in awk” with two full chapters of sample functions and programs
• Take advantage of gawk‘s many advanced features
• Debug awk programs with the gawk built-in debugger
• Extend gawk by writing new functions in C or C++

This book is published under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. You have the freedom to copy and modify this GNU manual.

Table of Contents

Part I. The awk Language
Chapter 1. Getting Started with awk
Chapter 2. Running awk and gawk
Chapter 3. Regular Expressions
Chapter 4. Reading Input Files
Chapter 5. Printing Output
Chapter 6. Expressions
Chapter 7. Patterns, Actions, and Variables
Chapter 8. Arrays in awk
Chapter 9. Functions

Part II. Problem Solving with awk
Chapter 10. A Library of awk Functions
Chapter 11. Practical awk Programs

Part III. Moving Beyond Standard awk with gawk
Chapter 12. Advanced Features of gawk
Chapter 13. Internationalization with gawk
Chapter 14. Debugging awk Programs
Chapter 15. Arithmetic and Arbitrary-Precision Arithmetic with gawk
Chapter 16. Writing Extensions for gawk

Part IV. Appendices
Appendix A. The Evolution of the awk Language
Appendix B. Installing gawk
Appendix C. GNU General Public License