The AWK Programming Language

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.

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