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| Preface |

## Acknowledgments for the Second Edition

After teaching myself about UNIX for the past 15 years, I'm off to graduate school in Computer Science. Frank Willison, O'Reilly's Editor-in-Chief, fit this project into the summer between leaving my position at ORA and starting school. Frank didn't just give me something to do in the summer: the royalties should help to pay for my coursework. (So, buy this book and support a student! `;-)`) Gigi Estabrook edited this edition and fielded my zillions of questions along the way. Many thanks to Gigi, Frank, and ORA's Production staff. Clairemarie Fisher O'Leary and Nancy Wolfe Kotary shared the jobs of production editor and project manager. Madeleine Newell and Kismet McDonough-Chan provided production support. Sheryl Avruch, Nicole Gipson Arigo, and Danny Marcus provided quality control checks. Lenny Muellner provided extensive troff assistance and technical support. Chris Reilley created the technical illustrations.

When time was short, I got expert advice from Arnold Robbins, the maintainer of the GNU gawk utility, and co-author of O'Reilly's sed & awk, second edition. He reviewed parts of the book and gave me thorough comments.

I'd also like to thank all the readers who took a moment to send us comments and corrections. I read every message, and the ideas in them made a big difference in this second edition. Three peoples' comments were extensive enough to mention specially. Ted Timar spotted problems that showed his deep knowledge of UNIX. I'm glad he still found the book useful enough to read it-and to spot goofs in some of our hairier tips. Andrew T. Young sent two long email messages: one a few years ago and another after I contacted him. He caught plenty of techno-goofs and also sent fixes for them. Andy doesn't know just UNIX: his background in English helped to sharpen a few rough spots in our folksy writing style. Finally, Greg Ubben sent a 15-page (!) email message that took me most of a week to work through. When I tracked him down, three years after writing his message, he was even more helpful. Greg wrote enough to make into a small book-and, in fact, agreed to write a few new articles, too. He's an expert in sed and regular expressions (and UNIX) who taught me a lot in our month of email messages back and forth. I deeply appreciate all that he's given to this book's readers.

- Jerry Peek, jpeek@jpeek.com

Acknowledgments |  | 1. Introduction