"In this updated guide, the creators of the Awk scripting language explain what it is and show you how to use it to solve a wide variety of problems more quickly and efficiently. Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan ("A, W, K") begin with a quick tutorial, enabling you to start writing useful programs in just a few pages. Then, using well-crafted examples based on current implementations, they demonstrate Awk's breadth of applications and the effective use of its facilities. You'll learn how to use Awk to perform exploratory data analysis; retrieve, validate, transform, and summarize data -- the tasks Awk was originally designed for; manage small databases, create reports, and write queries; generate text and streamline document preparation; write specialized "little languages" for narrow domains; and express, experiment with, and test algorithms. The authors present a wide variety of useful constructions for using Awk well, demonstrate its versatility through widely diverse applications, show how common computing operations are done in Awk, and illustrate a wide spectrum of problemsolving approaches. They conclude with a comprehensive reference manual containing even more examples"--