5 ms·

Show HN: “Command line text processing with GNU Coreutils” eBook

117 points by asicsp 5y ago

tyingq 5y ago
Bookmarked, looks interesting. I'm curious if you ran into cases where limiting yourself to just coreutils made things odd. Text processing without awk, for me, would be hard. Cut is janky about leading spaces, for example...it sticks to a pure delimiter mantra.
- asicsp 5y ago
  Thanks. >I'm curious if you ran into cases where limiting yourself to just coreutils made things odd. I wasn't limiting myself here, text processing with Coreutils was just one of the book ideas I had. I have already written separate books about grep, sed, awk, perl and ruby one-liners. On my todo list, I have text processing with Rust tools (ripgrep, frawk, hck, etc) and then working with json, xml, etc.
jph 5y ago
Great work-- I'm buying all your books with your $5 coupon link. HN folks often discuss ways to help open source, and ways to fund work that improves the open source ecosystem. In my opinion, your books are a superb way for more people to learn more about how to use open source tooling, and also to pay you a good fair price for your writing.
mongol 5y ago
I wonder how many coreutils commands that really are "core". Certainly cat, head, tail and a few more. But some of the others feel really esoteric, and I don't know if knowing them really helps you to solve problems faster. I think knowledge of perl, awk or sqlite will help much more.
- jstanley 5y ago
  Which ones do you think are esoteric?
  - Xophmeister 5y ago
    They definitely exist on a spectrum. Some are used super-regularly, others I've never heard of. `ptx` and `tsort` come to mind as esoteric; I'm not even sure what `ptx` does! Some are a bit redundant, as well (e.g., `dir`, `link`, etc.)
  - riffraff 5y ago
    for me: comm[0]. It's super useful when you need it, but I've never seen it used by anyone else but me. [0] https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/comm-invocation.html#comm-invocation https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/comm...
    - Xophmeister 5y ago
      `comm` and `join` are like super powers to those who don't know about them :)
    - cauthon 5y ago
      If I'm reading the man page correctly, the following two commands are almost equivalent? $ comm -12 file1 file2 $ fgrep -w -f file1 file2 but `comm` generalizes to accommodate lines with whitespace, instead of single words? although it requires the files to be sorted. That's actually a super useful tool to know about
      - asicsp 5y ago
        You can use `-x` option to compare whole lines. So `grep -Fxf` is similar to `comm -12` (this will differ if there are duplicate lines within a file)
    - aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
      Also check out `paste`!
SavantIdiot 5y ago
Bueno! I've said it a million times: if you're trying to do any kind of text processing on the *nix commandline, you can be 99.999% certain someone wrote a tool for it in the 80's.
neonological 5y ago
Cookbooks are great and tutorials are great. I wish there were a place where I have access to thousands of exercises that help me internalize these concepts. This is where I really have trouble. In my daily work I regress to old habits with Ctrl shift f in my ide rather then something like ripgrep.
asicsp 5y ago
Hello! I'm excited to announce my latest book titled "Command line text processing with GNU Coreutils". You might be already aware of popular coreutils commands like head, tail, tr, sort, etc. This book will teach you more than twenty of such specialized text processing tools provided by the GNU coreutils package. Plenty of examples are provided to make it easier to understand a particular tool and its various features. Resources for further exploration are also mentioned throughout the book. Visit https://github.com/learnbyexample/cli_text_processing_coreutils https://github.com/learnbyexample/cli_text_processing_coreut... for code snippets, example files, markdown source and other details related to the book. The post link points to the web version of the book. To celebrate the release, the ebook is free till Oct 15. You can get it from Gumroad or Leanpub: * https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/cli_coreutils https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/cli_coreutils * https://leanpub.com/cli_coreutils https://leanpub.com/cli_coreutils You can also get this book as part of a bundle with all my books published so far. It includes grep, sed, awk, perl, ruby one-liner books and five other books. Use this coupon to get the bundle for $5 - https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/all-books/fiver https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/all-books/fiver Hope you find this book useful. I'd highly appreciate your feedback. Happy learning :) --- PS: Four of us indie authors came together for a free Python giveaway for entire month of October. The bundle includes Python 101, Pydon'ts, Practice Python Projects, Python re(gex)? and Clean Architectures in Python books: https://leanpub.com/b/theindiepythonextravaganza/c/pytober https://leanpub.com/b/theindiepythonextravaganza/c/pytober
- chintler 5y ago
  Thank you for writing and making your books available. I just wish there was some way I could buy them with UPI.
  - asicsp 5y ago
    I did have an option couple of years back, but there were hardly any buyers. So I closed that store instead of spending time in keeping them updated. All my books are free to read online: https://github.com/learnbyexample/scripting_course#ebooks https://github.com/learnbyexample/scripting_course#ebooks Also, you could print to pdf using the markdown source from my GitHub repos or use tools like pandoc to convert markdown to pdf/epub.

117 points by asicsp 5y ago

Bookmarked, looks interesting. I'm curious if you ran into cases where limiting yourself to just coreutils made things odd. Text processing without awk, for me, would be hard. Cut is janky about leading spaces, for example...it sticks to a pure delimiter mantra.

asicsp 5y ago
Thanks. >I'm curious if you ran into cases where limiting yourself to just coreutils made things odd. I wasn't limiting myself here, text processing with Coreutils was just one of the book ideas I had. I have already written separate books about grep, sed, awk, perl and ruby one-liners. On my todo list, I have text processing with Rust tools (ripgrep, frawk, hck, etc) and then working with json, xml, etc.

jph 5y ago

Great work-- I'm buying all your books with your $5 coupon link. HN folks often discuss ways to help open source, and ways to fund work that improves the open source ecosystem. In my opinion, your books are a superb way for more people to learn more about how to use open source tooling, and also to pay you a good fair price for your writing.

mongol 5y ago

I wonder how many coreutils commands that really are "core". Certainly cat, head, tail and a few more. But some of the others feel really esoteric, and I don't know if knowing them really helps you to solve problems faster. I think knowledge of perl, awk or sqlite will help much more.

jstanley 5y ago
Which ones do you think are esoteric?
- Xophmeister 5y ago
  They definitely exist on a spectrum. Some are used super-regularly, others I've never heard of. `ptx` and `tsort` come to mind as esoteric; I'm not even sure what `ptx` does! Some are a bit redundant, as well (e.g., `dir`, `link`, etc.)
- riffraff 5y ago
  for me: comm[0]. It's super useful when you need it, but I've never seen it used by anyone else but me. [0] https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/comm-invocation.html#comm-invocation https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/comm...
  - Xophmeister 5y ago
    `comm` and `join` are like super powers to those who don't know about them :)
  - cauthon 5y ago
    If I'm reading the man page correctly, the following two commands are almost equivalent? $ comm -12 file1 file2 $ fgrep -w -f file1 file2 but `comm` generalizes to accommodate lines with whitespace, instead of single words? although it requires the files to be sorted. That's actually a super useful tool to know about
    - asicsp 5y ago
      You can use `-x` option to compare whole lines. So `grep -Fxf` is similar to `comm -12` (this will differ if there are duplicate lines within a file)
  - aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
    Also check out `paste`!

SavantIdiot 5y ago

Bueno! I've said it a million times: if you're trying to do any kind of text processing on the *nix commandline, you can be 99.999% certain someone wrote a tool for it in the 80's.

neonological 5y ago

Cookbooks are great and tutorials are great. I wish there were a place where I have access to thousands of exercises that help me internalize these concepts. This is where I really have trouble. In my daily work I regress to old habits with Ctrl shift f in my ide rather then something like ripgrep.

asicsp 5y ago

Hello! I'm excited to announce my latest book titled "Command line text processing with GNU Coreutils". You might be already aware of popular coreutils commands like head, tail, tr, sort, etc. This book will teach you more than twenty of such specialized text processing tools provided by the GNU coreutils package. Plenty of examples are provided to make it easier to understand a particular tool and its various features. Resources for further exploration are also mentioned throughout the book. Visit https://github.com/learnbyexample/cli_text_processing_coreutils https://github.com/learnbyexample/cli_text_processing_coreut... for code snippets, example files, markdown source and other details related to the book. The post link points to the web version of the book. To celebrate the release, the ebook is free till Oct 15. You can get it from Gumroad or Leanpub: * https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/cli_coreutils https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/cli_coreutils * https://leanpub.com/cli_coreutils https://leanpub.com/cli_coreutils You can also get this book as part of a bundle with all my books published so far. It includes grep, sed, awk, perl, ruby one-liner books and five other books. Use this coupon to get the bundle for $5 - https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/all-books/fiver https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/all-books/fiver Hope you find this book useful. I'd highly appreciate your feedback. Happy learning :) --- PS: Four of us indie authors came together for a free Python giveaway for entire month of October. The bundle includes Python 101, Pydon'ts, Practice Python Projects, Python re(gex)? and Clean Architectures in Python books: https://leanpub.com/b/theindiepythonextravaganza/c/pytober https://leanpub.com/b/theindiepythonextravaganza/c/pytober

chintler 5y ago
Thank you for writing and making your books available. I just wish there was some way I could buy them with UPI.
- asicsp 5y ago
  I did have an option couple of years back, but there were hardly any buyers. So I closed that store instead of spending time in keeping them updated. All my books are free to read online: https://github.com/learnbyexample/scripting_course#ebooks https://github.com/learnbyexample/scripting_course#ebooks Also, you could print to pdf using the markdown source from my GitHub repos or use tools like pandoc to convert markdown to pdf/epub.