Chances are good that you’re developing software on a platform that supports the Unix command line, even Microsoft platform developers have access to the Unix toolbox. There’s a lot of power and convenience to be found on the command line that can’t be replicated in a GUI.
If you’re manipulating text, which is what we do all day long, and
you’re not taking advantage of the Unix command line, you’re really
missing out on some huge productivity benefits. But getting started
with tools such as sed and awk can be intimidating and the manual
pages aren’t very helpful for a beginner either.
Here are some resources to get you going:
- Bruce Barnett maintains a rather complete introduction to sed with a PDF cheat sheet.
- If you like Bruce’s sed tutorial be sure to check out his equally good awk tutorial.
- Peteris Krumins wrote an article about sed oneliners and a book about awk.
- Joshua Thijssen has some practical examples of using awk to mine data from an Apache log file.
- And there’s the sed & awk book if you’re looking for a complete text with examples.