My previous experience with unix has limited to cc/gcc, vim, shell scripts, .cshrc and knowledge of some configuration files.
Recently, due to my job needs, I have tried to learn some make/nmake programming. After 1,2 days googling, I managed to dig up two good references. One is the 'NMAKE reference' from MSDN, and it is dedicated to Microsoft NMAKE, of course. I didn't find any downloadable version. The other is a tuotorial-like blog series on GNU MAKE usage from a very experienced Chinese programmer (google 跟我一起写Makefile). Fans have spent time to put the series together into a more readable PDF file. It is long, complete with many useful examples. It is very useful as both tutorial and reference manual.
Here, ladies and gentlemen, I am going to introduce some byproducts from my learning journey. (Thanks to the 2nd reference mentioned above.) You may already heard the name of SED and AWK, two famous unix utilities. What are they? read the following from: http://www.faqs.org/docs/abs/HTML/sedawk.html
sed: a non-interactive text file editor
awk: a field-oriented pattern processing language with a C-like syntax
Despite all their differences, the two utilities share a similar invocation syntax, both use regular expressions, both read input by default from stdin, and both output to stdout. These are well-behaved UNIX tools, and they work together well. The output from one can be piped into the other, and their combined capabilities give shell scripts some of the power of Perl.
so, try it!
