Slicing and Dicing on the Command Line

Apr 17, 2009, 00:02 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Jerry Peek)

"As you saw in last month's column (if you didn't see the column, you might want to review it), to start a new line at any point in plain text, simply insert a newline character. To join two lines, remove the newline between them -- and maybe add a space or TAB character to separate them. When a terminal or printer reads a TAB character, it moves the current position to the next tabstop. TAB characters are also used as field separators; you can make a simple database with TABs between the fields and a newline at the end of each record.

"Linux utilities can also reformat text that doesn't contain TABs. We'll see examples of that, too.

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