About.com: Common Shell Tools

“The real power of shell scripting is only fully realized
when the shell is used in conjunction with some of the myriad tools
which are standard on Unix and Linux systems. In this article,
you’ll find brief reference documentation for some of the most
commonly used tools.”

“The cut command is used to dissect a line of text and “pull
out” substrings based on a set of rules the user supplies. There
are two ways to use cut; the first is to define a delimiter and
select a field. Delimiters are a single character and follow the
‘-d’ argument; fields are numbered beginning with 1 and follow the
‘-f’ argument.”

“The echo command is probably the most commonly used command in
shell scripting; in some Linux configurations, it is built in to
the BASH binary; in other distributions, it exists as a separate
implementation in the /bin/echo binary. The most commonly supplied
argument is ‘-n’ and is used to prevent echo from appending a
newline character to the end of its output… A number of escape
sequences can also appear in the output strings provided to echo
and will have the following effects if the ‘-e’ argument is
supplied to the echo command…”

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