| Command | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| cat | Concatenate and display files | cat file1.txt file2.txt |
| sort | Sort lines of text files | sort file.txt |
| uniq | Remove duplicate lines from a sorted file | sort file.txt | uniq |
| grep | Search for patterns in files | grep "pattern" file.txt |
| cut | Extract columns of text from files | cut -f1,3 file.txt |
| sed | Stream editor for filtering and transforming text | sed 's/old/new/' file.txt |
| awk | Pattern scanning and processing language | awk '{print $1, $3}' file.txt |
| tr | Translate or delete characters | tr 'a-z' 'A-Z' < file.txt |
| wc | Count lines, words, and characters in a file | wc file.txt |
| diff | Compare two files and show differences | diff file1.txt file2.txt |
| patch | Apply a diff file to a file or directory | patch file.txt patch.diff |
| nl | Number lines in a file | nl file.txt |
| head | Display the first few lines of a file | head file.txt |
| tail | Display the last few lines of a file | tail file.txt |
| tee | Redirect output to a file and to the terminal | ls | tee output.txt |
| fmt | Format text files for printing | fmt file.txt |
| pr | Convert text files for printing | pr file.txt |
| iconv | Convert character encoding of a file | iconv -f utf-8 -t iso-8859-1 file.txt |
| dos2unix | Convert DOS line endings to UNIX line endings | dos2unix file.txt |
| rev | Reverse lines of a file | rev file.txt |
| fold | Wrap lines of text to a specified width | fold -w 80 file.txt |
| join | Join lines from two files based on a common field | join file1.txt file2.txt |
A quick reference for students learning Linux text processing.