Linux and UNIX Tools and Utilities

The evolution of Linux and UNIX

• Exploring the history of UNIX
• Examining current Linux/UNIX standards

Reviewing UNIX commands

• Manipulating files and directories
• Writing shell start-up files

Uncovering UNIX documentation

• Utilizing the man command
• Investigating other manual page browsers

Working with regular expressions

• Specifying string patterns for filtering operations
• The meta character set
• Developing extended regular expressions

Implementing the grep command

• Processing files
• Processing command output

Defining the characteristics of a filter

• Reading from standard input
• Writing to standard output and standard error
• Combining filters into pipelines to perform complex tasks

Performing tasks with common filters

• Editing the output of commands with the stream editor sed
• Translating characters with tr
• Sorting files and command output
• Comparing different versions of files with diff
• Using other common filters: cut and uniq
• Combining filters for complex text processing
• Executing filter commands with find

Exploring shell basics

• Writing simple shell scripts
• Storing data in shell variables

Controlling logic flow

• Making decisions with if and case
• Quoting shell commands to control substitutions
• Testing file attributes, strings and numbers
• Reading and testing standard input
• Looping with for and while
• Accessing the shell's built-in variables

Integrating other shell features

• Accepting command-line arguments
• Redirecting standard output
• Substituting command output
• Performing arithmetic in shell scripts
• Scanning for command line options

Working with tools creatively

• Combining filters with pipelines and command substitution
• Developing scripts incrementally

Establishing awk as a flexible search tool

• Writing useful awk one-liners
• Testing and extracting fields from structured input
• Performing arithmetic calculations

Creating long awk scripts

• Matching patterns with extended regular expressions
• Modifying awk's default behavior with special patterns and built-in variables

Extending awk capabilities

• Using awk's control constructs for testing and looping
• Storing data in arrays
• Formatting output using printf
• Searching files with multi-line records