Linux and Unix Shell Programming

Chapter 11. Merge and divide

A few years ago, I used to look after a collection of UNIX boxes that had PICK running on top. Most of the time that I spent in the actual PICK applications was for carrying out sort and join routines – sort this, join that. I was glad I wasn’t a full-time PICK operator.

Quite a few tools deal mainly with text file sorting, merging and dividing. We will look at some of these tools in this chapter.

In this chapter we will cover:

• useful sorts;

• uniq;

• join;

• cut;

• paste; and

• split.