extract awk scripts from The AWK Programming Language

The AWK Programming Language is the  book authored by the authors of AWK itself, Alfred Aho, Brian Kernighan, and Peter Weinberger. It contains many short awk langauge and awk script examples throughout. It makes them available for download from the book's homepage, all consolidated in a single text file. Find and download that file. It's at the link entitled "as text (120Kb)". The name of the file is awkcode.txt. The number of individual snippets of awk code in that file is over 200, with a total line count of over 3000.

Create a containing directory, cd into it, download awkcode.txt, and place it into that directory. You could download it from the homepage with a graphical browser via the provided link, or directly from the command line:

wget  http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/bwk/awkcode.txt

== Note: as of May 2015 I see the book's homepage has gone away. Please obtain awkcode.txt from the class unix server instead. ==

Upon receiving the file, you will want to break it out into the 200 individual snippets one per file. That way, you can use each file by executing it as a separate awk script. But this method of delivery, 200 different snippets on 3000 consecutive lines of a single text file, is unusual. How do you "unzip" a text file? The authors have provided a way to do it, by using awk itself on awkcode.txt. At the very beginning awkcode.txt there is a 2-line awk program that will do the job. Study that program, and the line structure within the file (upon which the method depends). Figure out how to invoke the code, against the text, to produce the snippets in 200+ individual files.