Bash & Linux·Bash from first command to automation

Text processing

Search, cut, sort and transform text with grep, cut, sort and awk.

Beginner 14 min read Lesson 5 of 300 Challenge included

What you will be able to do

Use grep -i for case-insensitive search.
Use cut -d and -f for delimited fields.
Use sort then uniq -c for counts.
Use awk for field-based reports.

In plain English

Most operations work is text. grep finds lines, cut extracts columns, sort orders them, uniq removes duplicates and awk handles fields and arithmetic. Learn the five and you stop opening a spreadsheet for simple questions.

terminalTerminal

printf 'css,18\nhtml,12\ncss,22\n' > minutes.csv
cut -d, -f1 minutes.csv | sort | uniq -c
awk -F, '{ total += $2 } END { print total }' minutes.csv

Your turn

Sum a column

Medium

Sum the second comma-separated column of minutes.csv using awk.

BASH · starter

awk

Check your understanding before moving on.

Knowledge checkQuestion 1

Which command counts duplicate lines after sorting?

Select an answer to continue

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Next: Processes

Lesson 5 of 300 · 0% of course