Modifying cat command to number paragraphs and display last paragraph only

Question

I have a text file for which I need to do three things:

1. Modify the "cat" command to highlight keywords whilst showing the complete contents of the file. SOLUTION FOUND
2. Modify the "cat" command to automatically number the paragraphs. These are separated by a single blank line.
3. Modify the "cat" command to display the final paragraph only.

The tricky part is that all of these need to be done by modifying the cat command.

I've seen many forum posts explaining that cat is not meant for this - and I can entirely see why. However, the challenge is that I have to use cat!

Answer 1

You really need to use cat?

cat -n  thefile | tail -n1 

What do you mean with "Highlight keywords whilst showing the complete contents of the file."

What keywords you want to highlight?

What is the purpose to number all the paragraphs but to show only the last one? (NOTE: the command that i write will do exactly this, cat -n to number the paragraphs, and tail -n1 to show only the last paragraph.)

Answer 2

Good luck with teaching gcse computing coursework ;) It doesn't specify to use cat in the question, at least in the one on the question sheet!

I just did

perl -00pe ‘s/^/$. /’ textfile

for 7ii and

perl -00pe ‘s/^/$. /’ jamestextfile | tail -n1

for 7iii

The important thing in question 7 is using pipe and stuff.

Answer 3

I found the question and the comments interesting, so I had a deeper look into it. According the comments given I understand that the question is more about "How to modify the output of the cat command?", maybe just by using command switches and if possible. Just a note, the question would be easier to understand if a sample input is given and the expected output is shown.

It is assumed the following TEST_FILE is given:

This is the first (1) paragraph. This is the second (2) sentence. This is the third (3) sentence.\n The fourth (4) sentence of the first (1) paragraph is the second (2) line of the first (1) paragraph.

This is the second (2) paragraph. This is the second (2) sentence of the second (2) paragraph. This is the third (3) sentence of the second (2) paragraph.


This is the third (3) paragraph. This is the second (2) sentence. This is the third (3) sentence of the second (3) paragraph.



This is the fourth (4) paragraph. This is the second (2) sentence of the fourth (4) paragraph. This is the third (3) sentence.




This is the fifth (5) paragraph. This is the second (2) sentence. This is the third (3) sentence.\n The fourth (4) sentence of the fifth (5) paragraph is the second (2) line of the fifth (5) paragraph.

The paragraphs are not separated by a single blank line (as it was requested), but it is good to learn how some of the commands are working.

Suppress repeated empty output lines:

cat -s TEST_FILE 
This is the first (1) paragraph. ...

This is the second (2) paragraph. ...

This is the third (3) paragraph. ...

This is the fourth (4) paragraph. ...

This is the fifth (5) paragraph. ...

Additionally number all output lines:

cat -s -n TEST_FILE
     1 This is the first (1) paragraph. ...
     2
     3 This is the second (2) paragraph. ...
     4
     5 This is the third (3) paragraph. ...
     6
     7 This is the fourth (4) paragraph. ...
     8
     9 This is the fifth (5) paragraph. ...

And number nonempty output lines only:

cat -s -n -b TEST_FILE
     1 This is the first (1) paragraph. ...

     2 This is the second (2) paragraph. ...

     3 This is the third (3) paragraph. ...

     4 This is the fourth (4) paragraph. ...

     5 This is the fifth (5) paragraph. ...

According your "SOLUTION FOUND" it seems to be agreed to use pipe and a second command to modify the output of the cat command. At least for your third requirement it would be necessary.

Therefore you could achieve the same result with number lines nl (but only if the the empty lines are really empty and do not contain white spaces):

cat TEST_FILE | nl
     1  This is the first (1) paragraph. ...

     2  This is the second (2) paragraph. ...


     3  This is the third (3) paragraph. ...



     4  This is the fourth (4) paragraph. ...




     5  This is the fifth (5) paragraph. ...

It would then be possible to Remove blank lines with grep also:

cat -s -n -b TEST_FILE | grep .

In case of lines with whitespaces it would be necessary to remove them first:

grep -v -e '^[[:space:]]*$' TEST_FILE | nl

To Echo newline in Bash you can use:

echo -e $(cat -s TEST_FILE | tail -1)
echo -e $(cat -s -n -b TEST_FILE | tail -1)

You could also show certain lines numbers only. But this is already leaving the scope of the question.