Classic Shell Scripting

Summary

This chapter covered about 30 utilities for processing text files. Collectively, they are a powerful set of tools for writing shell scripts. The most important, and most complex, is sort. The fmt, uniq, and wc commands are often just the tools you need in a pipeline to simplify or summarize data. When you need to get a quick overview of a collection of unfamiliar files, file, head, strings, and tail are often a better choice than visiting each file in turn with a text editor. a2ps, tgrind, and vgrind can make listings of your programs, including shell scripts, easier to read.