Text Manipulation with Command Line Utilities

If your computing experience has always involved GUI tools, you may be unfamiliar or rusty with the command line tools that Unix provides. Similarly, if, like me, you do almost all your text manipulation from within Emacs, you might also be rusty with the command line tools. Happily, Kade Killary has a solution.

Killary has a very useful post entitled Command Line Tricks for Data Scientists that discusses those tools and how to use them for a variety of everyday text manipulation chores. Although the title mentions data scientists particularly, the information is useful for anyone manipulating data in their day-to-day work.

He covers the tools

  1. Iconv
  2. Head
  3. Tr
  4. Wc
  5. Split
  6. Sort & Uniq
  7. Cut
  8. Paste
  9. Join
  10. Grep
  11. Sed
  12. Awk

and gives examples of their use. For some of the tools, like Iconv and Head, he tells you everything you’ll ever need to know; for others, like Sed and Awk, he mentions just a few use cases and points you to the documentation for more details.

At the end of the post he gives a series of links to further information. One of those links points to this Sed introduction and tutorial. It’s the best tutorial on Sed I’ve seen so if you took the advice in my Sed post, you’ll definitely want to take a look and bookmark it.

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