Sams Teach Yourself Unix System Administration in 24 Hours

Hour 22 Power Scripting with awk and Perl

The evolutionary path of a good system administrator usually goes from commands to pipes to aliases to shell scripts to something bigger. The something bigger step is usually C, C++, or Perl, but many system administrators opt to take the intermediate step of learning how to use the powerful awk language along the way.

Throughout this book, we’ve explored sophisticated Unix interaction, and the last hour (or perhaps hour and a half!) was focused on learning how to get the most out of shell scripts, including a number of programming-like structures and examples.

At some point in your long journey as a ...