The Awk Programming Language - Softcover

Originally developed by Alfred Aho, Brian Kernighan, and Peter Weinberger in 1977, AWK is a pattern-matching language for writing short programs to perform common data-manipulation tasks. In 1985, a new version of the language was developed, incorporating additional features such as multiple input files, dynamic regular expressions, and user-defined functions. This new version is available for both Unix and MS-DOS. This is the first book on AWK. It begins with a tutorial that shows how easy AWK is to use. The tutorial is followed by a comprehensive manual for the new version of AWK. Subsequent chapters illustrate the language by a range of useful applications, such as: *Retrieving, transforming, reducing, and validating data *Managing small, personal databases *Text processing *Little languages *Experimenting with algorithms The examples illustrates the book's three themes: showing how to use AWK well, demonstrating AWK's versatility, and explaining how common computing operations are done. In addition, the book contains two appendixes: summary of the language, and answers to selected exercises. 020107981XB04062001

Brian W. Kernighan works in the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies. He is Consulting Editor for Addison-Wesley's Professional Computing Series and the author, with Dennis Ritchie, of The C Programming Language. 020107981XAB04062001