Practice Exercise: Miscellaneous Text Utilities

Objective:

Explore various miscellaneous text manipulation utilities available in Linux.

Task 1: Using rev to Reverse Text

• Open a terminal window.
• Create a sample text file named original.txt with a sentence or phrase.
• Use the rev command to reverse the characters in the original.txt file.
• Observe the reversed output.

  [intern@intern-a1t-inf-lnx1 ~]$ echo "Hello, world!" > original.txt
  [intern@intern-a1t-inf-lnx1 ~]$ rev original.txt
  !dlrow ,olleH
  

Task 2: Counting Words and Characters with wc

• Create a new text file named word_count.txt with several lines of text.
• Use the wc command to count the number of words, lines, and characters in the word_count.txt file.
• Experiment with different options to display specific counts.

  [intern@intern-a1t-inf-lnx1 ~]$ echo "This is a sample text file." > word_count.txt
  [intern@intern-a1t-inf-lnx1 ~]$ echo "It contains multiple lines." >> word_count.txt
  [intern@intern-a1t-inf-lnx1 ~]$ echo "Counting words and characters." >> word_count.txt
  
  [intern@intern-a1t-inf-lnx1 ~]$ wc word_count.txt
   3 14 87 word_count.txt
  
  [intern@intern-a1t-inf-lnx1 ~]$ wc -l word_count.txt
  3 word_count.txt
  

Task 3: Sorting Text with sort

• Create a text file named unsorted.txt with multiple lines of unsorted text.
• Use the sort command to alphabetically sort the lines in the unsorted.txt file.
• Try sorting the text in reverse order and in numerical order.

  [intern@intern-a1t-inf-lnx1 ~]$ echo "zebra
  apple
  banana
  grape" > unsorted.txt
  
  [intern@intern-a1t-inf-lnx1 ~]$ sort unsorted.txt
  apple
  banana
  grape
  zebra
  
  [intern@intern-a1t-inf-lnx1 ~]$ sort -r unsorted.txt
  zebra
  grape
  banana
  apple
  
  [intern@intern-a1t-inf-lnx1 ~]$ echo "5
  42
  3" >> unsorted.txt
  
  [intern@intern-a1t-inf-lnx1 ~]$ sort -n unsorted.txt
  apple
  banana
  grape
  zebra
  3
  5
  42
  

Task 4: Removing Duplicate Lines with uniq

• Create a text file named duplicates.txt with some duplicate lines.
• Use the uniq command to remove duplicate lines and save the result in a new file called unique_lines.txt.

  [intern@intern-a1t-inf-lnx1 ~]$ echo "apple
  banana
  apple
  orange" > duplicates.txt
  [intern@intern-a1t-inf-lnx1 ~]$ uniq duplicates.txt
  apple
  banana
  apple
  orange
  [intern@intern-a1t-inf-lnx1 ~]$ sort duplicates.txt  | uniq
  apple
  banana
  orange
  

• uniq is often used with sort

Task 5: Formatting Text with fmt

• Create a text file named long_paragraph.txt with a lengthy paragraph of text.
• Use the fmt command to format the text, specifying a maximum line width.
• Observe how fmt wraps and formats the text.

  [intern@intern-a1t-inf-lnx1 ~]$ echo "This is a very long paragraph of text that needs formatting. It goes on and on, with no line breaks, making it difficult to read. Let's use the fmt command to format this text and wrap it to a specified line width." > long_paragraph.txt
  
  [intern@intern-a1t-inf-lnx1 ~]$ fmt -w 40 long_paragraph.txt
  This is a very long paragraph of text
  that needs formatting. It goes on and
  on, with no line breaks, making it
  difficult to read. Let's use the fmt
  command to format this text and wrap
  it to a specified line width.
  

Conclusion

In this lab exercise, you've explored various miscellaneous text manipulation utilities in Linux, including reversing text with rev, counting words and characters with wc, sorting text with sort, removing duplicate lines with uniq, extracting text columns with cut, and formatting text with fmt. These utilities are valuable for various text processing tasks in a Linux environment.