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Using the GNU text utilities

David Mertz (mertz@gnosis.cx), Developer, Gnosis Software, Inc.

David Mertz has an enduring fondness for munging text. He even went so far as to write the book, Text Processing in Python, and frequently touches on related topics for his IBM developerWorks articles and columns. David's Web site is also a good source of related information.

Summary: This introductory- to intermediate-level tutorial introduces the GNU text utilities and shows how to use them for processing log files, documentation, structured text databases, and other textual sources of data or content.

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Date: 09 Mar 2004
Level: Introductory
PDF: A4 and Letter (91 KB | 27 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 11643 views
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Before you start

About this tutorial

This tutorial shows you how to use the GNU text utilities collection to process log files, documentation, structured text databases, and other textual sources of data or content. The utilities in this collection have proven their usefulness over decades of refinement by UNIX®/Linux® developers, and should be your first choice for general text-processing tasks.

This tutorial is written for UNIX/Linux programmers and system administrators, at a beginning to intermediate level.

Prerequisites

For this tutorial, you should be generally familiar with some UNIX-like environment, and especially with a command-line shell. You need not be a programmer per se; in fact, the techniques described will be most useful to system administrators and users who process ad hoc reports, log files, project documentation, and the like (and less so for formal programming code processing). While working through this tutorial, it is a good idea to keep a shell open and try the examples shown as well as variants on them.

Basic concepts are reviewed in the Introduction: The UNIX philosophy , where you can brush up on the basics of piping, streams, grep, and scripting.

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