Scripting

sed & awk

Author(s): 
Dale Dougherty
Arnold Robbins
Description: 

sed & awk describes two text processing programs that are mainstays of the UNIX programmer's toolbox. sed is a "stream editor" for editing streams of text that might be too large to edit as a single file, or that might be generated on the fly as part of a larger data processing step. The most common operation done with sed is substitution, replacing one block of text with another. awk is a complete programming language. Unlike many conventional languages, awk is "data driven" -- you specify what kind of data you are interested in and the operations to be performed when that data is found. awk does many things for you, including automatically opening and closing data files, reading records, breaking the records up into fields, and counting the records. While awk provides the features of most conventional programming languages, it also includes some unconventional features, such as extended regular expression matching and associative arrays. sed & awk describes both programs in detail and includes a chapter of example sed and awk scripts. This edition covers features of sed and awk that are mandated by the POSIX standard. This most notably affects awk, where POSIX standardized a new variable, CONVFMT, and new functions, toupper() and tolower(). The CONVFMT variable specifies the conversion format to use when converting numbers to strings (awk used to use OFMT for this purpose). The toupper() and tolower() functions each take a (presumably mixed case) string argument and return a new version of the string with all letters translated to the corresponding case. In addition, this edition covers GNU sed, newly available since the first edition. It also updates the first edition coverage of Bell Labs nawk and GNU awk (gawk), covers mawk, an additional freely available implementation of awk, and briefly discusses three commercial versions of awk, MKS awk, Thompson Automation awk (tawk), and Videosoft (VSAwk).

Learning the Korn Shell

Author(s): 
Bill Rosenblatt
Description: 

This Nutshell Handbook(R) is a thorough introduction to the Korn shell, both as a user interface and as a programming language.

The Korn shell, like the C and Bourne shells, is a program that interprets UNIX commands. It has many features that aren't found in other shells, including command history (the ability to recall and edit previous commands). The Korn shell is also faster; several of its features allow you to write programs that execute more quickly than their Bourne or C shell equivalents.

This book provides a clear and concise explanation of the Korn shell's features. It explains ksh string operations, co-processes, signals and signal handling, and one of the worst "dark corners" of shell programming: command-line interpretation. It does this by introducing simple real-life examples and then adding options and complexity in later chapters, illustrating the way real-world script development generally proceeds. An additional (and unique) programming aid, a Korn shell debugger (kshdb), is also included.

Learning the Korn Shell is an ideal resource for many UNIX users and programmers, including software developers who want to "prototype" their designs, system administrators who want to write tools for their own use, and even novices who just want to use some of ksh's more advanced interactive features.

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