Re: [tlug] For the sake of discussion, Arcane commands?

[B0Ti <9915104t@example.com>]

"Eric O. Flores" wrote:

> I've been puzzled with some of the commands for text streams and text
> processing and filtering; cut, expand, fmt, head, join, nl, od, pr,
> split, tac, tail, and wc.
>
> How many of you use any of the above mentioned commands?

Basically all of us running linux or other unix flavors use them, even if
they are used indirectly (in scripts, etc). Most often these and other unix
commands are used in combination (with pipes, etc)
Here is an example of my constant usage of the tail command showing the
system logs in a terminal window:
gnome-terminal --nologin --title syslogs --nowtmp --noutmp -e "tail -f -n
40 /var/log/logs"


> In a practical sense, I know that many applications used today generate
> files which are not text based therefore it would kind of be
> inappropriate to use any of them.

These files can be converted to text or text can be extracted from them,
and then the above commands can be applied.
Example:  strings `which passwd` |more
Also, some of the commands you listed make sense and are even useful with
binary files (eg. split).

You call them "arcane commands" but actually they are the power of unix.
Most unix/linux books should cover a dozen of them at least.


--
B0Ti.