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CLI text processing with GNU awk

Example based guide to mastering GNU awk. Visit https://youtu.be/KIa_EaYwGDI for a short video about the book.

CLI text processing with GNU awk ebook cover image

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.


E-book

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/


Testimonials

Step up your cli fu with this fabulous intro & deep dive into awk. I learned a ton of tricks!

feedback on twitter

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!

feedback on Hacker News


Feedback and Contributing

⚠️ ⚠️ Please DO NOT submit pull requests. Main reason being any modification requires changes in multiple places.

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:


Table of Contents

  1. Preface
  2. Installation and Documentation
  3. awk introduction
  4. Regular Expressions
  5. Field separators
  6. Record separators
  7. In-place file editing
  8. Using shell variables
  9. Control Structures
  10. Built-in functions
  11. Multiple file input
  12. Processing multiple records
  13. Two file processing
  14. Dealing with duplicates
  15. awk scripts
  16. Gotchas and Tips
  17. Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to all my friends and online acquaintances for their help, support and encouragement, especially during these difficult times.


License

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.