Slicing and Dicing on the Command Line

“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.

Complete
Story