About the Author

Arnold Robbins, an Atlanta native, is a professional programmer and technical author. He is also a happy husband, the father of four very cute children, and an amateur Talmudist (Babylonian and Jerusalem). Since late 1997, he and his family have been living in Israel.

Arnold has been working with Unix systems since 1980, when he was introduced to a PDP-11 running a version of Sixth Edition Unix. His experience also includes multiple commercial Unix systems, from Sun, IBM, HP, and DEC. He has been working with GNU/Linux systems since 1996, and for this book was introduced to the joys of the Macintosh. (iTunes is now his current favorite "killer app.")

Arnold has also been a heavy awk user since 1987, when he became involved with gawk, the GNU project's version of awk. As a member of the POSIX 1003.2 balloting group, he helped shape the POSIX standard for awk. He is currently the maintainer of gawk and its documentation.

In previous incarnations he has been a systems administrator and a teacher of Unix and networking Continuing Education classes. He has also had more than one poor experience with start-up software companies, which he prefers not to think about anymore. These days he writes high-end Command and Control- related software for a leading Isreali software compnay. One day he hopes to put up his own web site at http://www.skeeve.com.

O'Reilly has been keeping him busy; he is author and/or coauthor of these bestselling titles: Learning the vi Editor, Effective awk Programming, sed & awk, Classic Shell Scripting, and several pocket references.