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Creating and Sorting Lists of Data

Database-like storage and search-oriented retrieval functions are also common day-to-day productivity uses for personal workstations. From the command line, you can accomplish these types of tasks using editors such as vi and emacs, plaintext files, and a set of two simple commands: sort, which is used to sort plaintext data into alphanumeric order, and grep, which is used to search text data for a specific word or phrase.

Creating Searchable or Sortable Lists

The art of creating useful plaintext databases with vi or emacs revolves mainly around the ability to use spaces or tabs effectively to organize information into single lines broken into multiple single-word columns. To create a plaintext database, start ...