Hello!

I am pleased to announce a new version of my “CLI text processing with GNU awk” ebook.

Learn the GNU awk command step-by-step from beginner to advanced levels with hundreds of examples and exercises. This book will dive deep into field processing, show examples for filtering features, multiple file processing, how to construct solutions that depend on multiple records, how to compare records and fields between two or more files, how to identify duplicates while maintaining input order and so on. Regular Expressions will also be discussed in detail.

Links:

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.

Happy learning :)

  • AggressivelyPassive
    23•10 months ago

    Two weeks after using awk the first time for real, I noticed the first grey hair in my beard.

    Could be coincidence, but I think we all know it’s not.

  • Eager EagleEnglish
    14•10 months ago

    so we can actually learn it? I thought it was like regex: we copy an example from stack overflow and cross our fingers.

  • @[email protected]
    11•10 months ago

    I just told myself earlier today that I should learn how to actually use awk, rather that copying from the internet. Thanks for this!

  • @[email protected]English
    8•10 months ago

    I very much enjoyed Command line text processing with Coreutils. It helped me when I was writing my thesis, which basically consisted of several (quite long) pipelines. It would have been quite helpful if I’d known awk, so I’ll check this book out!

    The web version looks very nice, but the PDF version feels a bit iffy (maybe a bit cheap?) to me — for example there are some bad pagebreaks (e.g. between pages 9 and 10 or pages 14 and 15). How do you create it? Perhaps you should get more hands-on with the typesetting. (I’m no expert on typography, but it would be a shame if your work was detracted from by the little imperfections that some people are sensitive to.)

    • learnbyexampleOPEnglish
      3•10 months ago

      Thanks a lot for the feedback on Coreutils book! It’s so nice to hear that it helped in your thesis.

      Regarding the ebook versions, I use pandoc to convert GitHub style Markdown to PDF/EPUB (wrote a blog post about my process here: https://learnbyexample.github.io/customizing-pandoc/). I had to search through stackexchange threads to customize the few things I could. I don’t know how to fix the kind of page breaks you mentioned. But, I’ll try to find a solution. Thanks again for the feedback :)

      • @[email protected]English
        2•10 months ago

        I can’t imagine writing a whole book in Markdown. I couldn’t live without the ability to create my own macros (like I can in TeX). But I digress. Those bad page breaks could perhaps be solved by using the nowidow (or any similar) package. If that doesn’t work, manually put \pagebreak or \newpage before the offending lines.

        Keep up the good work! :-)

  • palordrolap
    5•10 months ago

    NB: awk + sed + shell is approximately Perl.

    You are on a slippery slope. Which you might enjoy tbh. Good luck either way.

    • learnbyexampleOPEnglish
      5•10 months ago

      I have a book for Perl One-Liners as well, which I’m currently revising :)