Gawk Effective awk Programming

This book is the gawk reference manual, but at its core it is a book about AWK program- ming that will appeal to a wide audience. It is a defnitive reference to the AWK language s defned by the 1987 Bell Labs release and codifed in the 1992 POSIX Utilities standard. On the other hand, the novice AWK programmer can study a wealth of practical pro- rams that emphasize the power of AWK’s basic idioms: data driven control-fow, pattern matching with regular expressions, and associative arrays. Those looking for something ew can try out gawk’s interface to network protocols via special ‘/inet’ fles. The programs in this book make clear that an AWK program is typically much smaller nd faster to develop than a counterpart written in C. Consequently, there is often a payof o prototype an algorithm or design in AWK to get it running quickly and expose problems early. Often, the interpreted performance is adequate and the AWK prototype becomes the product.