Basic Linux Terminal Tips and Tricks: Learn to Work Quickly on the Command Line

© Philip Kirkbride 2020

P. KirkbrideBasic Linux Terminal Tips and Trickshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6035-7_10

10. Parsing Text

Philip Kirkbride¹ 

(1)

Montreal, QC, Canada

 

No matter what you’re doing on Linux, you’ll likely find yourself needing to parse text at some point. As Linux is largely file based, there is a huge need for utilities which can parse large amounts of text to find specific values, format, and process it.

There are several utilities that can be used for parsing text. In this chapter, we’ll look at several of these utilities and how you can see them to parse text.

grep

grep is one of the most commonly used command-line tools. It allows you to find a specific string in a set of text. For example, given a file with several lines, ...