Command-line-text-processing

Perl's problem is that it's more confusing than it is powerful. I think most of the people who were into Perl for the "beauty" ended up going to ruby. People who were into it for CPAN went to python. You might find this interesting, as you can see the spirit is alive and well: https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processi... ruby -0ane 'print $F.shuffle[0..3].join,"\n"' < /usr/share/dict/words If you're intrigued by the idea of perl one-liners, go explore ruby.

Reminds me of a similar article [1] Once you get a hang of how shell constructs like pipes, redirections, globs, variable/command substitutions, etc, the various cli text processing tools like grep, sed, awk, perl, sort, tr, pr, paste, etc are worth to learn at least the basics. They have been through years of use and heavily optimized for performance. Just today, a friend of mine called to ask how to improve a Python script's performance for 5-10 MB text file. After confirming he isn't using any other special modules, I advised to check if the performance improves by implementing it using awk. If anyone's interested in examples based tutorials on cli text processing tools, check out my github repo [2] [1] https://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/why-learn-awk/ [2] https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processi...

I made a compilation of Ruby one-liners [1] as well last year. There's plenty of stuff that is similar to Perl, which in turn had borrowed from awk, sed and other tools. The biggest difference I'd pick is Perl's context based operation. # Ruby requires explicit conversion with to_i ruby -ane 'print if $F[1].to_i > 35' perl -ane 'print if $F[1] > 35' Performance is slower compared to Perl, but to those who already know Ruby, this would suit better than learning the nuances of another language. [1] https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processi...

I have a curated list of resources[1] on topics like learning command line basics, bash scripting, style guide, etc. I have also have my own basics guide[2] and a comprehensive cli text processing repo[3] [1] https://github.com/learnbyexample/scripting_course/blob/mast... [2] https://github.com/learnbyexample/Linux_command_line [3] https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processi...

I'd say it is more similar to perl than awk for options like -F -l -a -n -e -0 etc. And perl borrowed stuff from sed, awk, etc I have a collection for ruby one-liners too [1] [1] https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processi...

I have a collection of such one-liners, for duplicates including how to form key for multiple fields, see [1] [1] https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processi...

I haven't tried it yet, but it would depend on what sort of features you need Python wouldn't be a good choice for cli usage Perl is awesome to use from cli, and it is not just simple search and replace, see my tutorial[1] if you want to see examples sed and awk are awesome on their own for cli usage, sed is meant for line oriented tasks and awk for field oriented ones (there is overlap too) - one main difference compared to perl is that their regex is BRE/ERE which is generally faster but lacks in many features like lookarounds, non-greedy, named capture groups, etc you could check out sd[2] for a Rust implementation of sed like search and replacement (small subset of sed features) [1] https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processi... [2] https://github.com/chmln/sd

some notes on the sample awk/sed/perl one-liner given: # input line has to be explicitly printed awk '{gsub(/Jack/,"Jill")} 1' file.txt # -i will do inplace editing, unlike the awk command # -i by itself won't work on non-GNU versions, needs backup extension sed 's/Jack/Jill/g' file.txt # use single quotes always, unless double is needed # -p will behave like default sed perl -pe 's/Jack/Jill/g' file.txt personally, I prefer the terseness of these commands over verbose SQL like syntax (and also the fact that I don't know SQL like tools) However, I would agree that initial learning curve is tough for sed/awk/perl. Once you get familiar with their idioms, they become the swiss army knife of cli text processing (along with grep). I have an entire repo dedicated to such tools[1] [1] https://github.com/learnb

I have an example based tutorial for all these commands plus other cli text processing commands https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processi...