C H A P T E R  12

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Working with Text Files

Windows views text files as just another file type, but to Ubuntu (and to the whole Linux family in fact), they are the very fabric of which the system is made. Configuration files and program documentation are stored as plain text. This is clearly different from Windows, where any information you're supposed to read will likely be contained in a Windows help file, a rich text format (RTF) file, or even a Microsoft Word document.

So important are text files to Linux that for a long time you could have been caught in a heated debate . . . over which text editor was the best! And while traditionally text ...

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