Customer Rating:  
Summary: basic tools to do a basic job
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: a great little book
Comment: I found understanding/writing sed/awk commands/scripts a daunting task until I bought this book. This book empowers you. I rate it at par with "the vi editor" from same publisher
Customer Rating:
Summary: Can Replace All of Your SED & AWK Bookmarks (2ndEd)
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Old, but Ok for the porpurse
Comment: If you want understand all the sed advanced commands, this book is for you !
I recommend using perl instead sed or awk
Customer Rating:
Summary: Come for the sed, stay for the awk!
Comment: This book is a timeless classic, the information on sed is invaluable to anyone who regularly works with text files or streams (after all sed is short for stream editor). Not only is it very informative it's also a fun and easy read... You'll be seeing uses for sed almost every day once you learn how powerful it can be!
The last 1/2 or so is on awk and although it's also very well written and informative it's not quite as useful if you're already experienced with a high level language with excellent text processing facilities like Python or Perl. However, it's work reading even if you keep thinking "I could do this in _____" because sometimes awk really is the right answer.
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