[Techtalk] real life kewl text-processing and regexps samples wanted

[Carla Schroder]

Howdy gang,

I'm putting together a sort of 'text and file processing howto', and I'm 
looking for real-life useful examples. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with 
it, either make a technical FAQ page on linuxchix.org, or my own web site, or 
something. I might even propose it to tldp.org. But wherever it lands, it 
first must be written.

I want anything and everything, what I like best are useful snippets that 
actually do something. For example, Telsa posted this on one of the lists:

man foo | col -b > filename

This strips the control characters and creates a nice editable file. How cool 
is that? There's zillions of these kinds of things that people use all the 
time. This is one I picked up on IRC from kathryn:

awk -F: '($3 >= 1050) &&($3 <=1060)  { print $1}' /etc/passwd 

It's an easy way to select a range of lines and print only the fields that I 
want.  It took me five minutes of tinkering to figure out about a dozen 
different ways to use this command.

Putting together a page of live, working examples is a superior teaching tool. 

So let's have 'em, and don't be shy.

thanks!
-- 
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Carla Schroder
www.tuxcomputing.com
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