sed & awk: UNIX Power Tools

This book is amazing and holds a great educational value beyond merely learning the titular tools. It refers to itself as a handbook, which I find to be quite an understatement.It explains the tools using a unified framework approach which makes everything about them logical. It goes into their lineages and how under the stark difference in syntax, the two tools share a lot in terms of philosophy and underlying mechanics.The way they demonstrate each argument through use cases the authors had faced previously and solved with either tool makes it really easy to understand the argument at an intuitive level even before experimenting with it.But perhaps what I find pleasent the most about this book is the style of writing. You feel so close to the thinking process that produces it, yet you hardly feel any ego, unlike most technical publications today. I had hard time putting the book away and I was always keen on the time I set aside for reading it. Something I don't always experience with technical books. Perhaps it is that people were not allowed to publish unless they had a way with words before web 2.0 came along! (Just look at the photo attached of a hilarious footnote from the book).And as a data scientist heavily involved in Natural Language Processing, I was using what I learned on the go with my daily tasks.If you want to understand Unix and Unix like systems better, then this is definitely an important book to read and keep by your side.

I recently ran into a problem where I had to process some *massive* text files (many 10+ GB text files with medical data) and this book helped save me. In my case, I had datasets where the structure was changing over the years so I needed to preprocess them before I could load it into either SAS or R. I found partial solutions on the web but this book quickly got me up to speed on these ancient but wildly useful tools. If you, like me, find part of a solution that uses sed or awk on the web and want to know what the heck it is actually doing grab this book.The introduction to all things UNIX is surprisingly gentle. So, if you know how to find the Mac Terminal or a bash shell on a Windows box this book will be fine for you.While there are occasional references to old/dead technology the code is functional for modern UNIX (including Mac).

This book is like a big tutorial series, packed with tons of applicable examples. It is not a reference, that's what the man pages are for, although the index if very good. In fact, the combination of the *BSD man pages and this book would give any man all the SED and AWK documentation he would ever need.SED and AWK are these two very terse programs that, if you don't use them everyday, you tend to forget their syntax and functionality. I am not an everyday user. Before I bought this book, I often visited one of my many SED/AWK bookmarks. After years of using both programs, I never really understood them. I knew just enough to do small one-liners. However, I recently needed to build a fairly complex script to perform an automated OS upgrade via the network. I knew SED and AWK could help me accomplish my task, but I didn't have a full understanding of their potential. That's when I decided to buy this book. I have since then deleted all of my SED and AWK bookmarks.After studying this book and highlighting the hell out of it, I have a clear understanding of these two tools and how to effectively utilize them.

While laying in bed sick over this past weekend I read the SED portion of this book with out ever touching a keyboard. When I was done I got up and went to my computer and within 10 minutes I wrote a script that in 11 lines and 50 characters took the place of a Java program I had made to do the same task that was 120 lines and 740 characters... oh and it does it in 1/10th the time... This author lays things down in such a way that even while laying sick in bed simply reading from cover to cover you come out with such an understanding of what this tool can do that by the end of it your slamming your head against the wall for all the hours you have waisted on previous scripts/applications. 5 Stars hands down even if the AWK portion has nothing but "LoLz" written on every page!

Computers do one basic job, they process data. Often, you do not have control over the output format of the data, but the stuff you want in in there somewhere. So you capture the output to a file, and then chop and hack at it with a text editor to get the data you want in format somewhat like you want.You can either spend the rest of eternity with a text editor or get these guys, and learn a bit to instruct them to do totally boring but useful drudgery. And perhaps learn about regular expressions and pattern matching. And then do something interesting.Don't worry, you will have do do it again, if for no other reason than the entity that controls the format of the data decided to change it, for no other reason than to annoy and confound you. But, since you have learned about pattern matching, a minor change will fix it, and you can go back to whatever.The specific purpose this time was to avoid subscribing to a listing service for cable tv programming. Zap2it publishes the listings on most newspaper websites, and program called wget allows me to write these listings to a file. Then using sed to slice and dice allows me to read simply formatted listings, and eventually feed them to a recording system.

The UNIX command line pipeline remains one of the seminal concepts of computer science. It remains one of the greatest achievements in my opinion and AWK may be one of the greatest embodiments of the concepts while adding just enough capability to be a language on its own as well. In these days of rdf and jason, plain and encoded text remains a viable alternative for simple tasks. Very well worth the read, especially if you were not trained in the 60s or 70s ...

Los clásicos nunca mueren, excelentes herramientas para procesamiento de texto, en lo personal las utilizo, junto con M4, para mantener diversas versiones de código, en entornos CI/CD enfocados a la calidad.

correspond en tout point. a ce qui était attendu par mon fils qui l’a commandé sur le site. très bien.

A classic, I had this book 10 years ago or more, and I enjoyed it then, now I got it again, and will enjoy it again.

Wer darüber nachdenkt sich dieses Buch zu kaufen sollte eventuell vorher "Classic Shell Scripting" des selben Verlags lesen.Dieses Buch beschreibt hervorragend sed & awk, aber eben nicht mehr. Viele Dinge in dem Buch machen natürlich nur Sinn oder ergeben einen Nutzen wenn man fundierte Shell-Scripting Fähigkeiten vorweisen kann.

Se hai qualche dubbio o non ricordi qualcosa su sed o awk, questo è il libro che vuoi tenere sulla tua scrivania