Chapter 3. Work with File Content

This chapter is all about file content and what you can do with it from the Unix command line. The nine projects cover the following topics:

  • View text files. Learn how to display text files page by page and view them dynamically as they are being written.

  • View nontext files. View binary and compressed files.

  • Search files. Say hello to grep and friends—the Unix equivalent of Spotlight.

  • Sort and compare files. Unix has some handy utilities to process text files.

  • Compress files. Discover tar-balls for archiving, and learn how to zip and unzip.

These projects show you how to search the file system for specific content, view files, process them, and compress them. For related projects, see Chapter 4 on Unix text editors, ...

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