Summary

We have had three Chapters where we have used awk. Starting with some basic usage statements in Chapter 10, Awk Fundamentals where we became comfortable. Within Chapter 11, Summarizing Logs with Awk and this chapter we started building our bespoke applications.

Specifically, in this chapter we saw how we could create reports from the output of standard commands, such as lastlog. We saw that we could negate ranges and additionally make use of the OR statement. We then built the application that will allow us to query XML data.

For the next two chapters, we will move away from the shell scripts and look at scripts using perl and Python so we can compare the scripting languages and make appropriate choices.