Command Line Fundamentals

2

Command-Line Building Blocks

Learning Objectives

By the end of the chapter, you will be able to:

• Use redirection to control command input and output
• Construct pipelines between commands
• Use commands for text filtering
• Use text transformation commands
• Analyze tabular data using data-processing commands

This chapter introduces you to the two main composing mechanisms of command lines: redirection and piping. You will also expand your vocabulary of commands to be able to perform a wide variety of data-processing tasks.

Introduction

So far, we have learned the basics of how to work with the filesystem with the shell. We also looked at some shell mechanisms such as wildcards and completion that simplify life in the command line. In this ...