CNS 2205

MCS 8302
Network Programming
Text Processing – grep – sed – cut - awk

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 Text Processing Utilities
• Linux offers various utilities for processing text
• awk: A pattern scanning and processing language.
• sed: sed is a stream editor which copies the input
filenames specified (standard input default) to the
standard output, edited according to a script of
commands.
• cut: Remove selected fields from each line of a file.
• cat: cat reads input from files, or from standard
input, and displays it on the standard output.
• sort: A utility to sort and collate files.
• tee:
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 Text Processing Utilities
• uniq: Remove or report adjacent duplicate lines.
• wc: Display a count of lines, words and characters.
• tr: Apply a translation to characters, eg NEWLINE to
SPACE.
• grep, fgrep and egrep: Search a file for a string or regular
expression.
• echo: Echo arguments to the standard output.
• head: Display the first ten lines of a file
• tail: Display the last ten lines of a file.
• more: Browse or page through a text file, one screen at a
time.
• less, more: An Interactive file browser.

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 Text Processing Utilities
• Piping: |
• Pipes are used to pass the output of one program (stdout)
as the input (stdin) to another
• Output redirection: >, >>
• we can write (>) or append (>>) to a file

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 Text Processing Examples
• head, tail (head: first ten lines, tail: last ten line)
• Can be used to read a file or receive input via pipe
• -n option: number of lines
• For tail, -n+K means line K to the end
• head -5 (first five lines)
• tail -7 (last 7 lines)
• tail -n+10 | head -n 5 : lines 10-14

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 Text Processing Examples
• cut
• -d Choose the delimiter between columns (default
tab)
• -f : Fields to print
• -f1,7 : fields 1 and 7
• -f1-4,7,11-13 :fields 1,2,3,4,7,11,12,13
• cut -d ‘.’ –f2 file.txt

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 Text Processing Examples
• wc
• Print line, word, and character (byte) counts for each
file, and totals of each if more tan one file specified
• -l Print only line counts
• -w print only word counts
• -c print character counts only

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 Text Processing Examples
• grep
• Search for lines that contain a word or match a regular
expression
• -i Ignores case
• -v Output lines that do not match
• -E regular expressions • -f : patterns from a file (1 per
line)
• cat /etc/passwd | grep ozy : read the file /etc/passwd and
show all lines that have the word ozy
• grep ozy /etc/bind/ : show all lines that have the word
ozy in all files and directories in the directory /etc/bind
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 Text Processing Examples
• sed – Stream Editor
• Most common use is a string replace
• Can get input from a pipe or from a file
• sed -e “s/search/replace/g”
• This example replaces all occurrences of the word search
with the word replace

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 Text Processing Examples
• awk - is abbreviated from the names of the
developers – Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan.
• Awk is mostly used for pattern scanning and
processing.
• awk '{print}' employee.txt : This will print every line in the
file
• awk '/manager/ {print}' employee.txt : Print the lines which
match the given pattern i.e. manager
• awk '{print $1,$4}' employee.txt : Split lines into fields that
are delimited by white space. Note fields are stored in
variables $1,…, $n; $0 stores the original string

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