.. Objectives
.. ----------
.. At the end of this tutorial, you will be able to:
.. 1.
.. 2.
.. Prerequisites
.. -------------
.. 1. Using Linux tools - Part 1
.. 2. Using Linux tools - Part 2
.. 3. Using Linux tools - Part 3
.. 4. Using Linux tools - Part 4
Script
------
.. L1
{{{ Show the first slide containing title, name of the production
team along with the logo of MHRD }}}
.. R1
Hello friends and Welcome to the tutorial on
'Using linux tools - Part 5'.
.. L2
{{{ Show slide with objectives }}}
.. R2
At the end of this tutorial, you will be able to,
1. Sort lines of text files
#. Print lines matching a pattern
#. Translate or delete characters
#. Omit repeated lines.
.. L3
{{{ Switch to the pre-requisite slide }}}
.. R3
Before beginning this tutorial,we would suggest you to complete the
tutorial on "Using Linux tools from Part 1 to Part 4".
.. R4
In this tutorial, we shall learn about text processing.
TO begin with, consider data kept in two files, namely marks1.txt and
students.txt
Let us see what data they contain. Open a terminal and type,
.. L4
{{{ Open the terminal }}}
::
cat marks1.txt
cat students.txt
.. R5
Let's say we wish to sort the output in the alphabetical order
of the names of the files. We can use the ``sort`` command for this
purpose.
We just pipe the previous output to the ``sort`` command as,
.. L5
::
cut -d " " -f 2- marks1.txt | paste -d " " students.txt -| sort
.. R6
Let's say we wish to sort the names, based on the marks in the first
subject i.e. the first column after the name. ``sort`` command also allows us to
specify the delimiter between the fields and sort the data on a particular
field. ``-t`` option is used to specify the delimiter and ``-k`` option
is used to specify the field.
.. L6
::
cut -d " " -f 2- marks1.txt | paste -d " " students.txt -| sort -t " " -k 2
.. L7
{{{ Show slide with, Sort... }}}
.. R7
This command give us a sorted output as required. But, what if we would
like the output to appear in the reverse order. ``-r`` option allows the output
to be sorted in the reverse order and the ``-n`` option is used to choose
a numerical sorting.
.. R8
Let us do it on the terminal and see for ourselves,
.. L8
{{{ Switch to the terminal }}}
::
cut -d " " -f 2- marks1.txt | paste -d " " students.txt -|
sort -t " " -k 2 -rn
.. R9
Suppose, While you are compiling the student marklist, Anne walks up to you and
wants to know her marks. You, being a kind person that you are, oblige.
But you do not wish to her to see the marks that others have scored. What
do you do? Here, the ``grep`` command comes to your rescue.
``grep`` is a command line text search utility. You can use it to search
for Anne and show her, what she scored. ``grep`` allows us to search for a
search string in files. But we could, like any other command, pipe the
output of other commands to it. So, we shall use the previous combination
of cut and paste that we had, to get the marks of students along with their
names and search for Anne in that.
.. L9
::
cut -d " " -f 2- marks1.txt | paste -d " " students.txt - | grep Anne
.. R10
This will give us only the line containing the word Anne as the output.
The grep command is by default case-sensitive. So, we wouldn't have got
the result if we had searched for anne, with a small a, instead of
Anne, with a capital a. But, what if we didn't know, whether the name was
capitalized or not? ``grep`` allows you to do case-insensitive searches
by using the ``-i`` option.
.. L10
::
cut -d " " -f 2- marks1.txt | paste -d " " students.txt - | grep -i Anne
.. R11
Now, in another scenario, if we wished to print all the lines, which do
not contain the word Anne, we could use the ``-v`` option.
.. L11
::
cut -d " " -f 2- marks1.txt | paste -d " " students.txt - | grep -iv Anne
.. R12
grep allows us to do more complex searches, for instance, searching for
sentences starting or ending with a particular pattern and regular
expression based searches.
{{{ Show slide with, tr }}}
``tr`` is a command that takes two sets of characters as parameters, and
replaces occurrences of the characters in the first set with the
corresponding elements from the other set. It reads from the standard
output and writes to the standard output.
For instance, if we wish to replace all the lower case letters in the
students file with upper case, we can do it as,
.. L12
{{{ Switch to the terminal }}}
::
cat students.txt | tr a-z A-Z
.. R13
A common task is to remove empty newlines from a file. The ``-s`` flag
causes ``tr`` to compress sequences of identical adjacent characters in its
output to a single token. For example,
.. L13
::
tr -s '\n' '\n'
.. R14
Hit enter 2-3 times and see that every time we hit enter we get a newline.
.. L14
::
<Enter>
<Enter>
.. R15
It replaces sequences of one or more newline characters with a single newline.
The ``-d`` flag causes ``tr`` to delete all tokens of the specified set of
characters from its input. In this case, only a single character set
argument is used. The following command removes carriage return characters,
thereby converting a file in DOS/Windows format to the Unix format.
.. L15
::
cat foo.txt | tr -d '\r' > bar.txt
.. R16
The ``-c`` flag complements the first set of characters.
.. L16
::
tr -cd '[:alnum:]'
.. R17
It therefore removes all non-alphanumeric characters.
Let us consider one more scenario.Suppose we have a list of items, say books,
and we wish to obtain a list which names of all the books only once, without
any duplicates. To achieve this, we use the ``uniq`` command. Let us first
have a look at our file
.. L17
::
cat items.txt
.. R18
Now, let us try and get rid of the duplicate lines from this file using
the ``uniq`` command.
.. L18
::
uniq items.txt
.. R19
Nothing happens! Why? The ``uniq`` command removes duplicate lines only when
they are next to each other. So, henceforth, we get a sorted file from the
original file and work with that file.
.. L19
::
sort items.txt | uniq
.. R20
``uniq -u`` command gives the lines which are unique and do not have any
duplicates in the file. ``uniq -d`` outputs only those lines which
have duplicates.
.. L20
::
uniq -u items-sorted.txt
.. R21
The ``-c`` option displays the number of times each line occurs in the file.
.. L21
::
uniq -dc items-sorted.txt
.. L22
{{{ Show summary slide }}}
.. R22
This brings us to the end of the end of this tutorial.
In this tutorial, we have learnt to,
1. Use the ``sort`` command to sort lines of text files.
#. Use the ``grep`` command to search text pattern.
#. Use the ``tr`` command to translate and/or delete characters.
#. Use the ``uniq`` command to omit repeated lines in a text.
.. L23
{{{ Show self assessment questions slide }}}
.. R23
Here are some self assessment questions for you to solve
1. To obtain patterns; one per line, which of the following command is used ?
- grep -f
- grep -i
- grep -v
- grep -e
2. Translate the word 'linux' to upper-case.
3. Sort the output of the ``ls -al`` command.
.. L24
{{{ Solution of self assessment questions on slide }}}
.. R24
And the answers,
1. In order to obtain patterns one per line, we use the ``grep`` command
alongwith the -f option.
2. We use the tr command to change the word into uppercase
::
echo 'linux' | tr a-z A-Z
3. We use the sort command as,
::
ls -al | sort -n -k5
The -n means "sort numerically", and the -k5 option means to key off of
column five.
.. L25
{{{ Show the Thank you slide }}}
.. R25
Hope you have enjoyed this tutorial and found it useful.
Thank you!