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 been converting 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. Once all the chapters have been converted, I'll be archiving this repo.

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
• File attributes
  • wc, du, df, touch, file
• Miscellaneous
  • cut, tr, basename, dirname, xargs, seq

Rough drafts

• Wheres my file

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 '[email protected]' | tr 'a-z' 'n-za-m' or send a DM via twitter

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

exercises

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

As of now, only grep exercises has been added.

ebook

Includes only completed chapters

• Read as online ebook at gitbook
• All legacy.gitbook.com links are now automatically redirected to gitbook.com, so there's no longer an option to download ebooks for offline reading

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

• GNU grep and ripgrep
• GNU sed
• GNU awk
• Ruby one-liners cookbook
• More books planned, stay tuned...

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

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