Text Tools: grep, sed, awk

Part of the Linux course

Almost everything on a Linux system is text. Configuration files are text. Logs are text. The list of every user on the machine is a text file. Command output is text. That is a deliberate design choice, not an accident, and it means one skill pays off everywhere: being able to search through text, cut it down to the parts you care about, and change it, without opening a heavyweight editor for a file with ten...

Imagine a file with thousands of lines and you need the handful that mention one particular word. Reading the whole thing is not realistic. grep does that search for you: give it a pattern and a file, and it prints only the lines that contain a match, skipping everything else.