Text Searching and Manipulation

grep

• searches files or directories for a RegEx and output any line matching

sed

• can modify a stream of text
• E.g: echo "I need to try hard" | sed 's/hard/harder'

cut

• extract a section from a line
• echo "I hack binaries,web apps,mobile apps, and just about anything else" | cut -f 2 -d ","
• -f → field number to cut out
• -d → delimiter

awk

• text processing used for data extraction and reporting
• echo "hello::there::friend" | awk -F "::" '{print $1, $3}' → hello world
• compared to sed, awk supports multiple delimiters

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Relevant Note(s): Linux Basics