Books like sed & awk by Dale Dougherty

Sed & Awk is a comprehensive reference for two essential Unix text‑processing tools. The book explains sed as a stream editor for manipulating large or dynamically generated text streams, with an emphasis on substitution and other common edits. Awk is presented as a full programming language that operates on input records, automatically handling file I/O, field separation, and record counting while offering data‑driven logic, extended regular expressions, and associative arrays. The text details POSIX‑mandated features, such as the CONVFMT variable and the tolower() and toupper() functions, and compares different implementations including GNU sed and awk, Bell Labs nawk, gawk, mawk, and select commercial variants. Each chapter is complemented by example scripts that illustrate practical uses of the commands.

First publish date: 1990