Learn GNU awk with hundreds of examples and exercises. 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://leanpub.com/b/learnbyexample-all-books or https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/all-books
- Magical one-liners bundle from https://leanpub.com/b/oneliners or https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/oneliners
- Awesome Regex bundle from https://leanpub.com/b/regex or https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/regex
- 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 pdf/epub 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
- FabijanC and alexwheezy for spotting ambiguous descriptions, typos and issues with commands
- 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 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.