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Chapter 1 Power Tools for Editing
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There are a number of introductory UNIX books that will acquaint you
with sed and awk. The goal of this book is to take you much
further - to help you
master
sed and awk and
to reduce the amount of time and effort that it takes you to reach
that goal.
There are four hurdles on the way to mastering sed and awk. You must
learn:
-
How to use sed and awk.
This is
a relatively low hurdle to clear because, fortunately, sed and awk
work in a very similar manner, based on the line editor
ed
.
Chapter 2, Understanding Basic Operations
, covers the
mechanics of using sed and awk.
-
To apply UNIX regular expression
syntax.
Using UNIX regular expression syntax for pattern
matching is common to both sed and awk, and many other UNIX programs.
This can be a difficult hurdle for two reasons: the syntax is arcane,
and though many people have some experience using regular expressions,
few have persevered to master the complete syntax. The more facile
you are in using this syntax, the easier sed and awk are to use. That
is why we spend a good deal of time covering regular expressions in
Chapter 3, Understanding Regular Expression Syntax
.
-
How to interact with the shell.
While not
directly related to sed and awk themselves, managing the interaction
with the command shell is often a frustrating problem, since the shell
shares a number of special characters with both programs. If you can,
avoid the problem by putting your script in a separate file. If not,
use a Bourne-compatible shell for your scripts (the quoting rules are
more straightforward), and use single quotes to contain your script.
If you are using
csh
as your interactive shell,
remember to escape any exclamation points with a backslash
("\!"). There is no other way to get
csh
to leave
the exclamation point alone.[3]
-
The knack of script writing.
This is the most
difficult, rather like a series of high hurdles. Because of this, the
bulk of the book is devoted to script writing. With sed, you have to
learn a set of single-letter commands. With awk, you have to learn
the statements of a programming language. To get the knack of script
writing, though, you simply must pore over lots of examples and, of
course, must try your hand at writing scripts yourself.
If you were running the high hurdles, the ability to clear the hurdles
does not win the race - clearing them swiftly does. In writing
scripts, learning the scripting command set or language is simply
clearing the hurdle. Acquiring the ability to attack interesting
problems with your scripts is running fast enough to compete.
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