Example based guide to mastering GNU awk. Visit https://youtu.be/KIa_EaYwGDI for a short video about the book.
The book also includes exercises to test your understanding, which are presented together as a single file in this repo — Exercises.md.
For solutions to the exercises, see Exercise_solutions.md.
You can also use this interactive TUI app to practice some of the exercises from the book.
See Version_changes.md to keep track of changes made to the book.
- You can purchase the pdf/epub versions of the book using these links:
- You can also get the book as part of these bundles:
- All books bundle bundle from https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/all-books
- Includes all my programming books
- Magical one-liners bundle from https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/oneliners or https://leanpub.com/b/oneliners
- Awesome Regex bundle from https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/regex or https://leanpub.com/b/regex
- All books bundle bundle from https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/all-books
- See https://learnbyexample.github.io/books/ for a list of other books
For a preview of the book, see sample chapters.
The book can also be viewed as a single markdown file in this repo. See my blogpost on generating pdfs from markdown using pandoc if you are interested in the ebook creation process.
For the web version of the book, visit https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_gnuawk/
Step up your cli fu with this fabulous intro & deep dive into awk. I learned a ton of tricks!
I consider myself pretty experienced at shell-fu and capable of doing most things I set out to achieve in either bash scripts or fearless one-liners. However, my awk is rudimentary at best, I think mostly because it's such an unforgiving environment to experiment in.
These books you've written are great for a bit of first principles insight and then quickly building up to functional usage. I will have no hesitation in referring colleagues to them!
I would highly appreciate it if you'd let me know how you felt about this book. It could be anything from a simple thank you, pointing out a typo, mistakes in code snippets, which aspects of the book worked for you (or didn't!) and so on. Reader feedback is essential and especially so for self-published authors.
You can reach me via:
- Issue Manager: https://github.com/learnbyexample/learn_gnuawk/issues
- E-mail:
echo 'bGVhcm5ieWV4YW1wbGUubmV0QGdtYWlsLmNvbQo=' | base64 --decode - Twitter: https://twitter.com/learn_byexample
- Preface
- Installation and Documentation
- awk introduction
- Regular Expressions
- Field separators
- Record separators
- In-place file editing
- Using shell variables
- Control Structures
- Built-in functions
- Multiple file input
- Processing multiple records
- Two file processing
- Dealing with duplicates
- awk scripts
- Gotchas and Tips
- Further Reading
- GNU awk documentation — manual and examples
- stackoverflow and unix.stackexchange — for getting answers to pertinent questions on
awkand related commands - tex.stackexchange — for help on pandoc and
texrelated questions - /r/commandline/, /r/linux4noobs/, /r/linuxquestions/ and /r/linux/ — helpful forums
- canva — cover image
- oxipng, pngquant and svgcleaner — optimizing images
- Warning and Info icons by Amada44 under public domain
- arifmahmudrana for spotting an ambiguous explanation
- Pound-Hash for critical feedback
- mdBook — for web version of the book
- mdBook-pagetoc — for adding table of contents for each chapter
- minify-html — for minifying html files
Special thanks to all my friends and online acquaintances for their help, support and encouragement, especially during these difficult times.
The book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The code snippets are licensed under MIT, see LICENSE file.