Text Processing Reference

Text manipulation mastery. AWK field processing, sed transformations, jq JSON parsing, grep patterns, xargs pipelines, and the supporting cast of Unix text tools.

AWK

Topic Description

AWK Fundamentals

Field processing, patterns, BEGIN/END blocks

AWK Network

IP parsing, MAC addresses, VLAN tables

AWK Logs

Auth logs, syslog parsing, log analysis

AWK Advanced

Data structures, multifile, proc parsing

Core Tools

Topic Description

sed

Stream editing, substitution, line addressing

grep

Pattern matching, regex, context lines

jq

JSON parsing, filtering, transformations

xargs

Argument building, parallel execution

Regex

BRE, ERE, PCRE patterns and flavors

Escaping

Shell quoting, backslash rules, heredoc escaping

Line & Field Tools

Topic Description

cut

Delimiter-based field extraction, character ranges

paste

Merge lines horizontally from multiple sources

column

Columnate output into aligned tables

tr

Character translation, deletion, squeeze

sort

Numeric, field-based, version sort, deduplication

uniq

Deduplicate and count adjacent lines

comm

Set operations on sorted files

wc

Line, word, byte counting

diff

File and output comparison

find

Filesystem search and execution