bash Cookbook

Chapter 8. Intermediate Shell Tools II

Once again, we have some useful utilities that are not part of the shell but are used in so many shell scripts that you really should know about them.

Sorting is such a common task, and so useful for readability reasons, that it’s good to know about the sort command. In a similar vein, the tr command will translate or map from one character to another, or even just delete characters.

One common thread here is that these utilities are written not just as standalone commands, but also as filters that can be included in a pipeline of commands. These sorts of commands will typically take one to many filenames as parameters (or arguments), but in the absence of any filenames they will read from standard input. They also write to standard output. That combination makes it easy to connect to the command with pipes, as in something | sort | even more.

That makes them especially useful, and avoids the clutter and confusion of a myriad of temporary files.