Free ebook Unix Text Processing.pdf
Another free ebook from Oreilly books publisher. Unix was and is the platform for text processing. It has sometimes been criticised for its assumption that everything can be handled by simple type-less files — the “bag o’ bytes” approach. For text processing, this approach brings many advantages and no disadvantages.
Several chapters deal with getting the most out of Unix in general. All the usual suspects are rounded up: shell programming, sed, awk, etc, etc. Sadly, yet again, no mention of m4. But despite that flaw, these chapters together a really sound introduction to the Unix way of doing things. Two chapters, Ch. 3, Learning vi, and Ch. 7, Advanced Editing, cover the inimitable vi text editor. According to Tim O’Reilly, this book contains the full text of the early editions of “Learning the vi editor” (the current, 6th, edition is greatly expanded).
A great features of the book is that it shows how powerful the old Unix typesetting tools still are. Groff can do so much, if you take the time to learn how — and this book can show you. The chapters dedicated to it are a good tutorial for roff and associated tools (mm and me macro packages, eqn, tbl), and also manages to teach something about typesetting in general.
