Resources

Learn

• Get help with any of the utilities covered in this tutorial by typing man utility-name or utility-name --help at the command line. Or view the online man pages at GNU.
  
  
• Some other common UNIX and Linux command-line tools are covered in the developerWorks tutorial "GNU and UNIX commands" (developerWorks, November 2005) and Basic UNIX commands.
  
  
• Peter Seebach's "The art of writing Linux utilities: Developing small, useful command-line tools" (developerWorks, January 2004) gives guidelines and best practices for writing your own utility.
  
  
• Learn more about UNIX utilities, how to use them, and how to write your own in "UNIX utilities" (developerWorks, May 2001).
  
  
• Once you've learned to write your own utilities, learn how to turn them into a library! It's easy with the tutorial "Building a cross-platform C library" (developerWorks, June 2001).
  
  
• Get more in tune with your UNIX/Linux environment by reading the essays "Basics of the Unix Philosophy" and "The Unix Philosophy".
  
  
• Get started with bash programming with the three-part developerWorks series, starting with "Bash by example" (developerWorks, March 2000).
  
  
• David Mertz's "Using regular expressions" tutorial (developerWorks, September 2000) is a good starting point for understanding the tools like grep and csplit that use regular expressions.
  
  
• David's book Text Processing in Python (Addison Wesley, 2003; ISBN: 0-321-11254-7) also contains an introduction to regular expressions, as well as extensive discussion of many of the techniques in this tutorial using Python.
  
  
• David's article "Rexx for everyone" (developerWorks, February 2004) presents an alternative approach to simple text-processing tasks. The scope of the text utilities is nearly identical to the core purpose of the Rexx programming language.
  
  
• Find more tutorials for Linux developers in the developerWorks Linux one.
  
  
• Stay current with developerWorks technical events and Webcasts.
  
  

Get products and technologies

• Linux users will in all likelihood already have the text utilities installed in their distribution. But if not -- or if you are running older versions of them -- you can download the latest 27 GNU text utilities from their FTP site.
  
  
• The most current utilities have been incorporated into the GNU Core Utilities.
  
  
• Windows users can find these tools and many others in the Cygwin package, while Mac OS X users can try Fink.
  
  
• Download IBM trial software directly from developerWorks.
  
  

Discuss

• Read developerWorks blogs, and get involved in the developerWorks community.
  
  

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Table of contents

• Before you start
• Introduction: The UNIX philosophy
• Stream-oriented filtering
• Line-oriented filtering
• File-oriented filtering
• Combining and splitting multiple files
• Summarizing and identifying files
• Working with log files
• Summary
• Resources
• About the author

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