The GNU Awk User's Guide

What Hacker News says

1. dredmorbiusOct 2020
   GNU AWK User's Guide is reasonably succinct, while being fairly comprehensive.

   https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html

   The manpage alone is quite useful, though lacks some useful details.

   The awk FAQ provides general background, including diffeerences between implementations:

   http://www.faqs.org/faqs/computer-lang/awk/faq/

   Show morethread
2. yesenadamFeb 2019
   Same as usual, read every book about it![0] and don't try to learn from the man page. I think the original book by A, W and K (the 2nd edition anyway) was best. Also Arnold Robbins' books Sed and Awk and Effective AWK Programming are great.

   The GNU Awk User's Guide[1] is amazingly detailed, but the new AWK has bloated a lot, has 1000 features where the older one had a few dozen, and those core ones should be learnt first. (But people still like programming with it, and kept asking for features..) Hmm I don't think I use any of the new features, maybe I should...

   But really, it's very simple, I can't thinking of anything that's been anything like as easy to learn, except maybe BASIC. With which AWK shares some similarities - the friendliness of it, the BEGIN and END..

   [1] http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html

   [0] Or if there are too many, get names from lists of best books on a subject.

   Show morethread
3. legends2kJun 2018
   I've heard about _The Awk Programming Language_ but could get my hands only on _The GNU Awk User's Guide_ by Arnold Robbins, since it's available as Info pages on my Linux box. It's also free online

   https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html

   It's a pretty good book which teaches you both techniques and the nitty-gritty. I recommend this.

   thread
4. donatzskyJun 2014
   While somewhat specific to GAWK, the GNU Awk User's Guide is excellent.

   http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html

   thread
5. dredmorbiusMar 2020
   I've discovered page-oriented processing in awk, which is a godsend for parsing PDFs.

   See:

   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156456

   In the GNU Awk User's Guide:

   https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Multiple-...

   Tracking column and field widths across page breaks is ... interesting, but more tractable.

   Show morethread
6. dredmorbiusJan 2020
   Not for awk:

       BEGIN {
           RS=""
           FS="\n"
       }
   
       {
           for( i=1; i<=NF; i++ ) {
           nfields = split($i, afields, ": ")
           if( nfields != 2 ) {printf( "Bad fields count: %s %s %s\n", NR, i, $i) | "/dev/stderr"; exit 1 )}
           field(afield[1]) = afield[2]
           }
       }
   

   (Untested, but should be generally accurate.)

   That parses records based on blank lines, into fields based on lines, splitting the fields into individual data recoreds based on ": " as a regex.

   For more, see the GNU Awk User's Guide:

   https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Multiple-...

   Show morethread