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:
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.