CLI text processing with GNU Coreutils | Hacker News Reader

CLI text processing with GNU Coreutils

learnbyexample.github.io

24 pointsasicsp5 comments

Hello!

I am pleased to announce a new version of my "CLI text processing with GNU Coreutils" ebook. This ebook will help you learn 20+ specialized text processing commands. Major changes in this version were adding 100+ exercises and updating features for 9.1 coreutils package.

Links:

* Web version: https://learnbyexample.github.io/cli_text_processing_coreuti...

* Markdown source, exercise solutions, etc: https://github.com/learnbyexample/cli_text_processing_coreut...

* Interactive TUI app: https://github.com/learnbyexample/TUI-apps/tree/main/CLI-Exe... (includes some coreutils exercises)

I would highly appreciate it if you'd let me know how you felt about this book. It could be anything from a simple thank you, pointing out a typo, mistakes in code snippets, which aspects of the book worked for you (or didn't!) and so on. Reader feedback is essential and especially so for self-published authors.

Happy learning :)

I had a look at it and immediately learned about some utilities I didn't know existed. I'm going to have a browse through this in my leisure time. Thank you for your hard work!

You're welcome and thanks for the nice feedback!

That TUI program reminds me: back in the day, on Xenix systems, there was a program (it may have been an optional install) called 'learn'. Learn gave you basic lessons in how to manage files with the Unix command line utilities: moving, copying, deleting, editing, etc. At the end of each lesson it would test you by dropping you into a fake shell with a fake file system and having you perform the appropriate commands. It would respond the way a real shell would, and if you screwed up the worst thing that would happen was having to repeat the lesson.

I think that when it comes to complicated things like shells and programming languages, allowing the learner to play with the concepts involved is super important. So, thanks for reflecting that in the program.

There is a use case for sort that might be worth mentioning. If someone needs to sort billions or trillion of lines of data, it can be done with coreutils sort. The trick is to use —-temporary-dir and potentially use ulimit to restrict the process memory. Might be worth mentioning under sort as it’s a neat trick.

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