On Mon, 2009-01-05 at 13:40 -0700, Joseph L. Casale wrote: > >to match one or more, use + instead of *. > > > >* matches 0 or more, + matches 1 or more. > > Thanks! > <snip> > So gawk does all that sed does and more? I suppose I can start with Tons. You can write fairly complex programs with (g)awk. It can combine command line expressions, scripts from files, has formatted print capability, conditional execution, multiple regex selection capabilities and mode. A read of the man page would give you a lot of insight. Think of perl in an earlier form. The original awk was probably what inspired perl. That would be my guess. Since (g)awk is regex based, what you learn for sed, vi(m), etc. is easily transferred into (g)awk, and vice-versa, to a limited degree. > that in this case, I always wanted a book on regexe's so I think I > am going to order O'Reilly's Mastering Regular Expressions, Third Edition. > They also have a sed & awk, Second Edition book, but its 10+ years old, > does that matter, has sed/awk changed any since then? The man pages will allow you to keep up easily once the fundamentals are in place. Of course, frequency of use affects that greatly. > > Thanks everyone! > jlc > <snip> -- Bill