Open SUSE® 11.0 and SUSE® Linux® Enterprise Server Bible

Chapter 10. Text Manipulation

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Reading and extracting lines from files

• Working with text file fields

• Searching for text within files

• Formatting text files for printing

• Extracting text from other file formats

This chapter introduces some of the text manipulation tools available on Linux. They provide a remarkably powerful way of getting information out of text files, or altering those files in useful ways.

Typically, you might have a file containing information in the form of text items that are laid out with a certain structure, but you want to view only certain parts of that structure, or you want to transform the information into some other format.

For example, you might want to take a log file from some application and extract certain interesting parts of it while ignoring the rest. Or you might want to extract or summarize the important information from the file and format it in some other way. A great many tasks are of this general kind, and while the more difficult tasks may require complex scripting, a very useful set of tools is available for text processing tasks, which can save you the trouble of writing a script.

These tools can often be combined to make a single command line perform a relatively complicated text manipulation. Indeed, they have been designed with that in mind; each tool does a particular job well, in a clearly understood way, and the output from one tool can form the input to another so that a well-designed combination can perform a clever task. ...