Learning AWK Programming

This is the code repository for Learning AWK Programming, published by Packt. It contains all the supporting project files necessary to work through the book from start to finish.

About the Book

AWK is one of the most primitive & powerful utility which exists in all Unix and Unix-like distributions. It is used as command line utility for performing a basic text-processing operation and as programming language when dealing with complex text-processing and mining tasks.The best feature about AWK is, it is a data-driven language where you describe the data you wish to work with, and the set of actions you want to perform in case of pattern match. This book will provide you with the rundown explaining the required concept which will help you in getting started with AWK covering every element of functions, variables and more.

The book starts off with the introduction of AWK language essentials. The readers are then introduced to Regular Expressions, AWK variables& constant, arrays and AWK Functions. The book then dives deeper into more complex tasks like printing output in AWK, control flow statements, GNU's implementation of AWK covering the advanced features of GNU AWK like Network Communication, Debugging and Inter-process communication in Gawk Programming language which is not easily possible with AWK.

By the end of this book, the reader will have the chance to work on the practical implementation of Text Processing and Pattern matching using Awk and the cheat sheet for performing routine tasks.

Instructions and Navigation

All of the code is organized into folders. Each folder starts with a number followed by the application name. For example, Chapter02.

The code will look like the following:

[ shiwang@linux ~ ] $ sudo apt-get update -y
[ shiwang@linux ~ ] $ sudo apt-get install gawk -y

We have put our best efforts in to making this book's code and content relevant for the larger audience working on GNU/Linux. All the examples covered in the book are based on openSUSE Leap 42.3 Linux distribution with GAWK version 4.1.3 installed. You can use any Linux distribution having GAWK version 4.1.3 or above installed to practice the examples. GAWK is GNU’s open source implementation of AT&T's original AWK.

Only requirement for this book is the GAWK utility. Users can install the Windows variant of GAWK on their system if they want to practice the examples, but we strongly recommend using any Linux distribution for this purpose. For Windows and OS X, those who would like to practice it on a virtual environment can use VMware of Virtualbox to set up their favorite Linux distribution and then use AWK to execute the examples. For beginners, we have covered the installation of AWK programs on popular GNU/Linux distributions using package management and source code.

A basic understanding of GNU/Linux operating systems and familiarity with any text editor such as emacs, vi or nano are required. An understanding of shell scripting will be an added advantage to the reader.

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