This book is for anyone who is inclined to learn text processing and data extraction in a Unix-like environment. Readers will gain sufficient practical knowledge to write AWK one-liners for extracting data and write clean and small AWK programs to solve complex problems. You will be able to automate the process of cleaning any raw data, remove any extra unnecessary stuff, and create a desired reportable output. Examples given in the book are easily reproducible and will help you better understand AWK.
Text processing is used in data mining, data cleaning of CSV, and other similar-format database files. System administrators use it in their shell scripts to automate tasks and filter out command output. It is used extensively with grep, egrep, fgrep, and regular expressions for parsing text files. Its use cases vary from industry to industry, such as telecom enterprises and business process organizations that deal with large CSV files for storing logs and other user information. They use AWK for cleaning and transforming the structure of data from one form to another.
AWK one of the oldest and most powerful utilities that exists in all and Linux distributions. It is used as a command-line utility for performing basic text processing operations and as a programming language when dealing with complex text processing. The best thing about AWK is that it is a data-driven language: you describe the data you wish to work with, and the set of actions you want to perform in the case of a pattern match. This book will provide you with a rundown, explaining the concepts to help you get started with AWK. We will cover every element of functions, variables, and more.
This book will enable the user to perform text filtering, text cleaning, and parsing of input in user-defined formats to create elegant reports. Our main focus throughout the book is on learning AWK with examples and small scripts to quickly solve user problems. The mission of this book is to make the reader comfortable and friendly with AWK.
