Command-line-text-processing
:zap: From finding text to search and replace, from sorting to beautifying text and more :art:
A learning resource covering Linux command-line tools for searching, editing, and reshaping text files, including grep, sed, awk, sort, and more, organized into chapters with exercises, now archived with standalone free ebooks available.
This repository is a learning resource for people who want to get better at manipulating text files from the command line on Linux. It covers a range of tools that come built into most Linux systems and are used for searching, editing, sorting, and reshaping text without opening a graphical editor.
The content is organized into chapters, each covering a specific tool or group of tools. Topics include grep (for searching text), sed (for search and replace), awk (for more complex text extraction and transformation), sort and uniq (for ordering and deduplicating lines), and several smaller utilities like cut, tr, and paste. There are also chapters on comparing files, checking file attributes, and finding files on the system.
The author has since converted all these chapters into standalone free ebooks, hosted online with better formatting, exercises, and solutions. The repository itself is archived, meaning no new updates will be made to it, but all the original chapter files remain available to read. Anyone looking for the most current version of the material is pointed toward those ebooks.
The exercises directory contains practice questions for grep that you can work through directly in a terminal. A separate linked repository offers interactive exercises for other tools as well.
The license is Creative Commons NonCommercial ShareAlike, which means you can share and adapt the material freely for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the source. This is a reference and practice resource aimed at Linux beginners and intermediate users who want to get comfortable handling text data from the command line, without needing any programming background beyond knowing how to open a terminal.
Where it fits
- Practice using grep, sed, and awk to search and transform text files directly in a Linux terminal.
- Learn to sort, deduplicate, and compare files from the command line without writing any programming code.
- Work through exercises for grep and other tools to build confidence before using them in scripts or pipelines.