GAWK: Effective AWK Programming

6 GAWK: Effective AWK ProgrammingChapter 8 [Functions], page 130, describes the built-in functions awk and gawk provide,as well as how to define your own functions.Chapter 9 [Internationalization with gawk], page 160, describes special features in gawkfor translating program messages into different languages at runtime.Chapter 10 [Advanced Features of gawk], page 169, describes a number of gawk-specificadvanced features. Of particular note are the abilities to have two-way communicationswith another process, perform TCP/IP networking, and profile your awk programs.Chapter 11 [Running awk and gawk], page 177, describes how to run gawk, the meaningof its command-line options, and how it finds awk program source files.Chapter 12 [A Library of awk Functions], page 186, and Chapter 13 [Practical awkPrograms], page 215, provide many sample awk programs. Reading them allows you to seeawk solving real problems.Appendix A [The Evolution of the awk Language], page 257, describes how the awklanguage has evolved since first release to present. It also describes how gawk has acquiredfeatures over time.Appendix B [Installing gawk], page 265, describes how to get gawk, how to compile itunder Unix, and how to compile and use it on different non-Unix systems. It also describeshow to report bugs in gawk and where to get three other freely available implementationsof awk.Appendix C [Implementation Notes], page 284, describes how to disable gawk’s extensions,as well as how to contribute new code to gawk, how to write extension libraries, andsome possible future directions for gawk development.Appendix D [Basic Programming Concepts], page 300, provides some very cursory backgroundmaterial for those who are completely unfamiliar with computer programming. Alsocentralized there is a discussion of some of the issues surrounding floating-point numbers.The [Glossary], page 306, defines most, if not all, the significant terms used throughoutthe book. If you find terms that you aren’t familiar with, try looking them up here.[GNU General Public License], page 316, and [GNU Free Documentation License],page 327, present the licenses that cover the gawk source code and this book, respectively.Typographical ConventionsThis book is written using Texinfo, the GNU documentation formatting language. A singleTexinfo source file is used to produce both the printed and online versions of the documentation.Because of this, the typographical conventions are slightly different than in otherbooks you may have read.Examples you would type at the command-line are preceded by the common shell primaryand secondary prompts, ‘$’ and ‘>’. Output from the command is preceded by theglyph “ ⊣ ”. This typically represents the command’s standard output. Error messages, andother output on the command’s standard error, are preceded by the glyph “ error ”. Forexample:$ echo hi on stdout⊣ hi on stdout$ echo hello on stderr 1>&2error hello on stderr