Mac OS X UNIX 101 Byte-Sized Projects

Chapter 7. Programmatically Change Files

This chapter is about editing text files with Unix text-processing utilities. These utilities work from scripts or simple editing instructions and automatically edit files by following those instructions. The seven projects cover the following topics:

• Utilities to filter files. Apply simple transformations such as stripping blank lines and converting to lowercase.

• Batch-editing files.  Search for files to process and apply the same set of edits to each file.

• The sed stream editor.  Make complex modifications to a file by writing a script of editing commands.

• The awk pattern-scanning and processing language. Like sed, awk works from a script, but its scripting language is more powerful.

By using the techniques ...