We had three chapters where we used AWK, starting with some basic usage statements in Chapter 10, AWK Fundamentals where we became comfortable with AWK. In Chapter 12, Summarizing Logs with AWK, and this chapter, we started building our bespoke applications.
Specifically, in this chapter we saw how we could create reports from the output of standard commands, such as lastlog. We saw that we could negate ranges and additionally make use of the OR statement. We then built an application that will allow us to query XML data.
For the next two chapters, we will move away from shell scripts and look at scripts using perl and Python so we can compare these scripting languages and make appropriate choices.