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Comment by fforflo | Hacker News Reader

This [0] the most complete post I've read on the topic. Lays out all the relevant tools. Spending some time going through each tool's documentation/options, pays off tremendously.

[0]: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-unixtext/i...

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Wow, great find. Sad how hard it seems these days to come across an easy-to-follow primer on a topic without narrative fluff and/or ads everywhere. For those interested in a standalone copy there is a PDF of the content available here https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-unixtext/a...

Writing clear tutorials is a fair amount of effort, more than I originally thought when I first did it.

I haven’t seen that one before and it looks pretty good. Interesting that it doesn’t mention sed or awk (edit: I'm wrong, it does mention sed & awk), let alone Perl. I would say that Perl’s so powerful for one liners and Unix text pipelines, I’d consider it required in a text processing reference.

Another one I like, and I think it’s mainly because of the philosophy contained in the title is “Ad hoc data analysis from the Unix command line” https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ad_Hoc_Data_Analysis_From_Th...

Perhaps it's changed since you viewed it, but both sed and awk are described in the parent's link.

Oh, you're right, thanks! I doubt it changed, much more likely it was my mistake. ;) It was either operator error, or maybe the menu didn't display correctly while I was browsing using my iPad.

My main problem with this reference is that it encourages the use of non-portable utilities and flags. Double check against POSIX before writing any of this into your scripts:

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/