Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

The shell remains one of the most powerful tools on a computer system — yet a large number of users are unaware of how much one can accomplish with it. Using a combination of simple commands, we will see how to solve complex problems in day to day computer usage.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition will take you through useful real-world recipes designed to make your daily life easy when working with the shell. The book shows the reader how to effectively use the shell to accomplish complex tasks with ease.The book discusses basics of using the shell, general commands and proceeds to show the reader how to use them to perform complex tasks with ease.Starting with the basics of the shell, we will learn simple commands with their usages allowing us to perform operations on files of different kind. The book then proceeds to explain text processing, web interaction and concludes with backups, monitoring and other sysadmin tasks.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition serves as an excellent guide to solving day to day problems using the shell and few powerful commands together to create solutions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Translating with tr


tr is a small and beautiful command in the Unix command-warrior toolkit. It is one of the important commands frequently used to craft beautiful one-liner commands. It can be used to perform substitution of characters, deletion of the characters, and squeezing of repeated characters from the standard input. It is often called translate , since it can translate a set of characters to another set. In this recipe we will see how to use tr to perform basic translation between sets.

Getting ready

tr accepts input only through stdin (standard input) and cannot accept input through command-line arguments. It has the following invocation format:

tr [options] set1 set2

Input characters from stdin are mapped from set1 to set2 and the output is written to stdout (standard output). set1 and set2 are character classes or a set of characters. If the length of sets is unequal, set2 is extended to the length of set1 by repeating the last character, or else, if the length of set2 is greater...