Reddit reviews The AWK Programming Language

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The AWK Programming Language thanks sjhill
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if you are going to be programming awk, you need to get the book on it from A, W and K. Once you get a grasp of how AWK processes files, I think you'll go clear from there.

One Book

This is still the definitive work on the subject.

If you're open to learning a little awk, it can handle this in a breeze with a one-liner:

awk '/^\s*$/{next}{arr[$1]++}END{for (a in arr) print a, arr[a]}' test.log

Breaking it down:

• awk assumes space is the field delimiter. You can pass a different delimiter if you want.
  
• /^\\s*$/{next} means if the line is empty, ignore it
  
• {arr[$1]++} means make an array that holds your counts. `$1` means the first field
  
• If you have a header line that you don't want to count, change it to NR>1{arr[$1]++}
  
• END{for (a in arr) print a, arr[a]} means at the end of processing, loop through the array you made and print the results
  
  awk is super powerful, and a lost art. This book is a great read if you can pick up a used one.

It may be hard to find but The AWK programming language is good, but from late 1980s:

http://www.amazon.com/AWK-Programming-Language-Alfred-Aho/dp/020107981X/ref=sr_1_3/179-0702435-4816249?ie=UTF8&qid=1457304935&sr=8-3&keywords=awk

I've started with Unix for Poets. It's pretty good =)

http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs124/kwc-unix-for-poets.pdf

There are books on this. Like "The Unix Programming Environment" and "The AWK Programming Language", both books include Brian Kernighan as one of the authors, who is one of the creators of AWK and a UNIX wizard from its roots (no pun intended).

• http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Environment-Prentice-Hall-Software-Series/dp/013937681X
  
• http://www.amazon.com/The-AWK-Programming-Language-Alfred/dp/020107981X/