[GLLUG] Shell Scripting Question

[C. Ulrich]

Mike Rambo wrote:
> It's amazing what an (explained) example can do - something that's often
> not in man pages. Actually, at least the search & replace part is the
> same as what is used with vi. I guess all the various slashes etc that
> are often present when I've seen sed used in examples have been somewhat
> intimidating. The repuatation (for complexity) that regular expressions
> have also probably didn't help.
> 
> Thanks for the explanation.

At the risk of making this message sound like a cheesy salespitch, I can
highly recommend Jeffrey Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions. (An O'Reilly
book.) It gives a nice gentle introduction to RE's and what they can do
followed up by real-world examples and then gets down and dirty with the
details. Most people will probably only need a handful of the chapters in
order to get a pretty thorough knowledge of RE's. It details the various RE
engine flavors and how they operate, gives pointers on specific tools (grep,
sed, Python, Tcl). About a third of the book is devoted to RE's in Perl.

Superb book for anyone not already in-the-know with regular expressions. (And
possibly many who are.)

--Charles Ulrich
-- 
http://www.bityard.net