Command Line Text Processing

Learn about various commands available for common and exotic text processing needs. Examples have been tested on GNU/Linux - there’d be syntax/feature variations with other distributions, consult their respective man pages for details.

I’m no longer actively working on this repo. Instead, I’ve converted existing chapters into ebooks (see ebook section below for links), available under the same license. These ebooks are better formatted, updated for newer versions of the software, includes exercises, solutions, etc. Since all the chapters have been converted, I’m archiving this repo.

Ebooks

Individual online ebooks with better formatting, explanations, exercises, solutions, etc:

• CLI text processing with GNU grep and ripgrep
• CLI text processing with GNU sed
• CLI text processing with GNU awk
• Ruby One-Liners Guide
• Perl One-Liners Guide
• CLI text processing with GNU Coreutils
• Linux Command Line Computing

See https://learnbyexample.github.io/books/ for links to PDF/EPUB versions and other ebooks.

Chapters

As mentioned earlier, I’m no longer actively working on these chapters:

• Cat, Less, Tail and Head
  • cat, less, tail, head, Text Editors
• GNU grep
• GNU sed
• GNU awk
• Perl the swiss knife
• Ruby one liners
• Sorting stuff
  • sort, uniq, comm, shuf
• Restructure text
  • paste, column, pr, fold
• Whats the difference
  • cmp, diff
• Wheres my file
• File attributes
  • wc, du, df, touch, file
• Miscellaneous
  • cut, tr, basename, dirname, xargs, seq

Webinar recordings

Recorded couple of videos based on content in the chapters, not sure if I’ll do more:

• Using the sort command
• Using uniq and comm

See also my short videos on Linux command line tips

Exercises

Check out exercises directory to solve practice questions on grep, right from the command line itself.

See also my TUI-apps repo for interactive CLI text processing exercises.

Contributing

• Please open an issue for typos or bugs
  • As this repo is no longer actively worked upon, please do not submit pull requests
• Share the repo with friends/colleagues, on social media, etc to help reach other learners
• In case you need to reach me, mail me at echo 'yrneaolrknzcyr.arg@tznvy.pbz' | tr 'a-z' 'n-za-m' or send a DM via twitter

Acknowledgements

• unix.stackexchange and stackoverflow - for getting answers to pertinent questions as well as sharpening skills by understanding and answering questions
• Forums like Linux users, /r/commandline/, /r/linux/, /r/ruby/, news.ycombinator, devup and others for valuable feedback (especially spotting mistakes) and encouragement
• See wikipedia entry ‘Roses Are Red’ for poem.txt used as sample text input file

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License