Introducing sed and gawk
Richard A. Blum, Christine Bresnahan · 2015
This chapter describes the two most popular command line editors used in the Linux world, sed and gawk. The sed editor is called a stream editor, as opposed to a normal interactive text editor. The sed command executes and returns the data almost instantaneously. The gawk program takes stream editing one step further than the sed editor by providing a programming language instead of just editor commands. The gawk program allows you to filter just the data elements you want to view from the log file, and then you can format them in a manner that makes reading the important data easier. One of the primary features of gawk is its ability to manipulate data in the text file. The chapter describes some of the basic commands and features you can incorporate into your script to start using the sed editor.