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LINUX DATA MANIPULATION

Will Slicing & Dicing Lead to a Universal Brotherhood of Man?

One of the nice things about Linux is that it comes with a bunch of tools to help you manipulate files and data without writing programs.
For example, if you want to search inside a bunch of files, pull out all lines that contain a certain keyword, sort those lines, eliminate duplicates, and then print just the third column of each line, it's really not much trouble using the tools described in this section.

Writing a C program to do that would not be a trivial exercise, even for an experienced programmer. But you can use these slicing-and-dicing tools like building blocks to manipulate data and produce reports without a computer science degree.

Following is a description of how each tool works, and at the end of the section, you'll find some tips on how to combine them into even more powerful commands.

Previous Lesson: The Pico Editor
Next Lesson: Heads or Tails?

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