Manipulation of text by programs, scripts, etc.

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3
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2answers
4k views

How do I delete the first n lines of an ascii file using shell commands?

I have multiple files that contain ascii text information in the first 5-10 lines, followed by well-tabulated matrix information. In a shell script, I want to remove these first few lines of text so ...
3
votes
1answer
301 views

How to display TSV (csv) in console, when empty cells are missed by: `column -t -s $'\t' `

I have file with columns spearated with tab. I have file when some rows have empty cells (on begining, in middle). In such cases column -t -s $'\t' simply fails: Input: $ echo -e ...
3
votes
2answers
994 views

My awk program to change spaces into tabs doesn't work

How to write a shell script which uses awk to read in the data file students.txt and output the data in the tabbed format as shown: Surname Forename MSc Stream Date of Birth Smith John IT 15.01.1986 ...
3
votes
1answer
1k views

How to numerical sort by last column?

I have this input: sdkxyosl 1 safkls 2 asdf--asdfasxy_asd 5 dkd8k jasd 29 sdi44sw 43 asasd afsdfs 10 rklyasd 4 I need this output: sdi44sw 43 dkd8k jasd 29 asasd afsdfs 10 asdf--asdfasxy_asd 5 ...
3
votes
3answers
2k views

Is it possible in bash, to start reading a file from an arbitary byte count offset?

I want to locate a date which is somewhere in an 8 GB log (text). Can I somewhat bypass a full sequential read, and first do binary splits of the file (size), or somehow navigating the filesystem ...
3
votes
1answer
687 views

How does one find and replace text in all open files with geany?

How does one find and replace text in all open files with geany?
2
votes
3answers
2k views

How to search and replace text in all php-files in a directory and it's subdirectories

I am looking for a shell script that recursively traverses all .php files in a directory and performs a search & replace of a particular text pattern. The search pattern is quite long ( > 5000 ...
2
votes
1answer
240 views

How does one find and replace text in all open files with LibreOffice?

How does one find and replace text in all open files with LibreOffice?
1
vote
1answer
198 views

Verify that /etc/passwd has correct number of fields on each line?

I'm looking for an easy, portable way to validate the number of fields in /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group and /etc/master.passwd. This would run on FreeBSD, Linux and other Un*xes. pwck does ...
1
vote
3answers
312 views

Switch from grep to sed

I have a files students.txt, with lines of the form: Surname, Forename: Day.Month.Year: Degree For example: Smith, John: 15.01.1986: MSc IT Taylor, Susan: 04.05.1987: MSc IT Thomas, Steve: ...
7
votes
1answer
236 views

Change date “July 29th, 2011” to “20110729”

I have lots of HTML files contains date with format July 29th, 2011 I want to change date format July 29th, 2011 to 20110729, December 9th, 2010 to 20101209, etc. I think sed may works but still ...
7
votes
2answers
775 views

How can I cut a large file in place?

I have a very big text file, about 80GB, and I need to cut a part form it that lies between two given lines. The part I need is not big, and I have not enough space left on the hard drive to do things ...
7
votes
2answers
402 views

What governs the limits of shell brace expansion?

In this example I refer to the expansion of a sequence of integers, but perhaps(?) the limits would be relevant to all aspects of brace expansion.. This more general view is also of interest to me. ...
7
votes
2answers
118 views

How does one find and replace text in all open files with jed?

How does one find and replace text in all open files with jed?
6
votes
4answers
12k views

Finding text between two specific characters or strings

Say I have lines like this: *[234]* *[23]* *[1453]* where * represents any string (except a string of the form [number]). How can I parse these lines with a command line utility and extract the ...
5
votes
2answers
201 views

Find all files with a Python Shebang

I'm trying to run a PEP8 check against a large source tree. The tree is comprised of a mix of files in various languages. The idea is to check all the Python scripts without having to explicitly list ...
5
votes
4answers
249 views

Tool to create text files from a template

I have to regularly create 100+ text files from templates. I currently use an overly complicated shell script. I think there is a smarter way to handle this, but I don't know how. I have a "database" ...
5
votes
2answers
104 views

Sort fields inline

I'm trying to sort within a line of input over an unknown number of fields: Input: ab bc bc ab cd ef bc bc cd ef cd bc ab ef ab bc cd gh Output: ab bc ab bc bc cd ef bc cd ef ab cb cd ab bc cd ...
4
votes
3answers
576 views

Any (text based) plotting tools in unix toolbox?

I was wondering if there are any generic plotting tools available in the unix toolbox? By plotting I mean simple bars or things you see in many curses based utilities. And by unix toolbox I mean ...
3
votes
1answer
185 views

grep list of names and information from bigger file

I have two files: one with list of names (500 entries) and other having some more information for each entry in A.txt and extra entries too. File A.txt (each line is starting with > (fasta format) ...
3
votes
2answers
339 views

How to count the number of lines in a UTF-16LE/CR-LF/BOM file?

The immediate thought is wc, but then the next not-so-immediate thought is... Is *nix's wc purely for *nix line endings \x0a?... It seems so. I've semi-wangled my way around it, but I feel there ...
3
votes
2answers
286 views

How to skip file in sed if it contains regex?

I currently use the following simplified command to remove trailing whitespace and add a newline at end of file where needed: find . -type f -exec sed -i -e 's/[ \t]\+\(\r\?\)$/\1/;$a\' {} \+ As ...
3
votes
5answers
604 views

How to replace a list of placeholders in a text file?

I have a text (configuration) file, but the program that reads the file unfortunately doesn't allow using any kind of variables. So I'd like to use a preprocessor that replaces a set of placeholders ...
2
votes
3answers
61 views

Scripting to domain allocation to server

I have two text files: file #1: domain.txt cocacola.com airtel.com pepsi.com file #2: servers.txt 192.0.53.42 , 4 # 4 domains already allocated on server 192.0.53.42 192.53.1.2 , 1 # 1 ...
2
votes
5answers
2k views

Bash iterate over a list of strings

I have this bash script: for opt in string1 string2 string3 ... string99 do somestuff It works, but I would like to replace the explicit listing of my strings with a file which actually contains ...
2
votes
1answer
936 views

Delete last character in a word but only if the character is there - in bash

How to remove last character only if it's there? input: OpenOffice.org/m openOffice.org/ozm Pers. Pfg. phil. Prof. resp. Roonstr./m roonstr./ozm desired output: OpenOffice.org openOffice.org ...
2
votes
1answer
205 views

How to join vCards lines

vCard uses a special way to split long lines: At 75 characters, insert a DOS newline and a space. Joining therefore means to replace all occurrences of the sequence "CR, LF, space" with an empty ...
2
votes
4answers
2k views

Print odd-numbered lines, print even-numbered lines

I want to print the odd-numbered and even-numbered lines from files. I found this shell script which makes use of echo. #!/bin/bash # Write a shell script that, given a file name as the argument ...
2
votes
3answers
251 views

Returning only the portion of a line after a matching pattern

I have a file (file_name) which contains exactly one occurance of the string Result:, at the start of a line. I want to print all the characters after the string Result: in that line until I encounter ...
2
votes
1answer
191 views

Possible to extract title and pagenum of each page in a pdf file

I was wondering if there are some ways to extract title and pagenum of each page in a pdf file? Either by some applications, or by programming in some programming language with some pdf libraries? ...
2
votes
1answer
194 views

rotating buffer type file logging utility

I'am trying to debug a server that throws a lot of logs on stdout/stderr. I need to redirect only last N lines to a file. Something like a rotating buffer feature there in tcpdump's -C & -W flags. ...
2
votes
2answers
2k views

How does one find and replace text in all open files with kate?

How does one find and replace text in all open files with kate?
2
votes
2answers
516 views

How does one find and replace text in all open files with gedit?

How does one find and replace text in all open files with gedit?
1
vote
1answer
341 views

Reading the contents of the file and splitting using ksh

We're using a ksh script for installing one product. I've another config file, I'd need to read this configuration file from my main script Content of the Configuration file: ...
1
vote
1answer
236 views

Reading two files into an IFS while loop — Is there a way to get a zero diff result in this case?

I have a text file full of several hundred lines of sequences like this: b 29. b 52. c 84. c 83. c 94. c 93. c 61. b 38. c 81. c 92. c 28. c 37. ...

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