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Comment by choffman | Hacker News Reader

I really appreciate you writing this guide. As a long time Linux user, I've always wanted to learn AWK, but it seemed too daunting. Three minutes into your guide and I immediately saw how I could use it in my day-to-day usage.

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I blame GNU's man page. I was in the same situation for the longest time, but stumbled over a man page for a simpler implementation of awk (plan9's, in my case) and learned it in 10-15 minutes (not claiming I understood it more than partially in that time of course, but enough to write my own small programs).

Since then I've made a point of finding man-pages from other systems whenever the manual for a GNU tool is a bit daunting. It tends to lower the learning threshold quite a lot, honestly.

    $ man gawk | wc
       1568   13030   94207
    $ man -l /usr/share/man/man1/awk.1plan9.gz | wc 
        214    1579   10956

Not trying to detract from this great guide. Just a general tip :)

I tend to use cat-v since you can check really old versions which tend to be far simpler.

http://man.cat-v.org/unix_7th/1/awk

Thank you! It took me longer to write then I expected it would. I was originally just going to do some small examples of each idea.

But once I got the idea of aggregating the book review data from amazon I felt I had to see it through.

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