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Bodyaev Dmitry, 123RF.com
With the jack-of-all-trades sed, you can certainly master any kind of text manipulation, but the result is often complex and hard-to-remember syntax. The helpers presented in this article replace or enhance sed for many smaller text editing tasks.
Many small programs can help you with your "word tasks" in the shell. Table 1 shows an overview of which ones to use. Unless indicated otherwise, they work with single or multiple files as well as pipe operations. Some applications overlap in their functionality.
To follow along with the examples shown in this article, you can grab the files a.txt , b.txt , c.txt , d.txt , and e.txt from our FTP server [1].
The cat and tac tools differ mainly by the output order of the content: cat puts the file in its original order, and tac reverses the order. The scope of their options is also different (see Table 2). You can also add line numbers using cat (Figure 1), including blank lines.
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With sed, you can edit text data without an interactive user interface, using pipes or input redirection. Sed lets you execute extensive editing commands on a single line.
lsof give you a comprehensive list of all open files, be it a regular file, a library, a network file, or a data stream. We show you how to use lsof and how to make things easy with a simple graphical interface.
The moreutils package expands the standard tools for the shell with useful and sometimes exotic tools.
The ultra-slim web server HTTPie turns out to be an elegant synthesis of curl and wget, making it ideal for use with pipes.
In Linux, the need for text processing programs is a big one: System configuration, system management, and data exchange all use text-based files. With Awk, you have a powerful tool at your fingertips for text editing and targeted modification.
