Hi.
I'm going to learn scripting and i have the following topics on the list: sed, awk, shell scripting, perl.

My question is, whehter i should learn sed and awk? Aren't this tools outdated?
Although i see that GNU upgrade it's versions of these tools from time to time.

And, the next question. Would the "Sed & awk" book be useful for reading on the sed topic? It is 1997.

For awk i'm going to read Effective awk Programming by GNU.

The sed & awk book is excellent for both. They are useful and stable tools which do not evolve much any more, but are still useful to have around. If you mean to be able to read and understand Unix shell scripts written by others, they are a must. Advanced sed scripting might not be all that useful to know if you are going to be learning awk and Perl anyway, but the basics (substitution, regex matching, maybe simple loops) are used a lot to make up for missing features in the shell.

PS I guess you know both books are available on-line for free?
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&...result#PPP1,M1
http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/

thanks for the links era...

Good qns be kukuruku...

My question is, whehter i should learn sed and awk? Aren't this tools outdated?
Although i see that GNU upgrade it's versions of these tools from time to time.

Can somebody ans for the above please...

- nani

if you want to choose 1 between the 2 , then learn awk.

those tools where created a long time ago, they are old, not outdated !!
there still beeing updated.
they are used alot in linux system scripts
a huge part of the scripts around relay on those

so, is it worth it ? (and pardon the my french) hell yeah

their importance is more clear after you learn how many things they can do

how much in depth you learn depends on what you spect to accomplish

I would suggest both are important assuming that perl is not in the choice list, had perl been there in the list it would do everything

I feel its quite easier with sed to regex, information extraction etc.

Just my 2 cents

It depends on what you want to do with Unix/Linux but first off, try to master the system utilities: ls, cat, cmp, grep, etc. and learn to use an editor like vi(m). Then, master the shell, you can do a great deal of useful work with just the shell and the utilities.

Once you've learned how to write useful scripts in the shell, try to master utilities like sed and awk.
After that you can think about a program language and that depends on what you want to do.

Regards