Hey,

can someone tell me what's easiest way to learn
awk - gawk < command >

appreciate!!

i'd say the easiest way would be to use a good tutorial written by someone who's already mastered it...

I would always learn something like this be actually using it. Start by writing some very simple scripts.

Here is one of a zillion hits on Google: http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Awk.html
I have used the SED tutorial form the same site and it is excellent.

Also, go to http://tldp.org and get "Bash Guide for Beginners" by Machtelt Garrels

Maybe I'm a bit to hardcore, but I learned a lot with the info documentation.

Just call it with info gawk and take a glance at it.
There's lot's of stuff, examples, code and some basic stuff.
If you already have some basic knowledge of shell scripting this should be enough.

If you don't like the default interface of the Texinfo manuals, just apt-get install pinfo, this proggy displays the info pages as HTML like in w3m or lynx.

You can also use Konqueror to browse it from your KDE desktop. Gnome has also an interface for this, but I can't stat how it's called.

Many years ago I learned awk, sed, shell scripting. Then I found Perl, and thought, that's what I should have been doing from the beginning!

Probably that's not what you wanted to hear; after all you're interested in awk. I'd go with info gawk then.

I third info gawk, as long as you can view it in HTML. (Using the raw info system would almost be enough to convince me to learn perl).

I always use Konqueror to view info, the syntax is: info:gawk or ##gawk. Just enter the above in the "Location:" box. (The 'g' is necessary.)

As you might expect the general case is: info:<command> or ##<command>.

BTW, man:<command> or #<command>, will get you man pages.

A really nice feature of the Konqueror HTML display, is that the info system structure all becomes regular links & can be opened in multiple tabs. (Right & middle click are your friends. ). Also, in the man page conversion many references to other man pages become useable links.


I sometimes call these pseudo-protocols, but the real name is "Kioslave". There are 2 lists of them in the KDE help system: one, under "Kioslaves" in the main contents; the other, on a page titled "IO-Slaves" found using the "help:" kioslave -- help:kioslave.

These lists are not quite identical.

Some of the help is good, some rudimentary.

thank you for all your referrences

Please tell us what you did, what worked for you, & what progress you're making.

thank you guys..i get it now

We do appreciate the thanks, but please also tell us what worked for you.

I, for one, do not post just to help the current questioner, but also to help create a body of solutions. If you don't tell us which proposed solution worked for you, then you haven't done your part in this process. It's a small repayment for our time & thought.