On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 14:17, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > On 5/12/2010 3:53 PM, Kenneth Wolcott wrote: >> >> Almost any introductory book on Linux/UNIX that covers the standard >> command line utilities (sed, awk, greg, egrep, tr, cut, etc) could >> have answered the questions he had. > > I don't think you've actually looked at current introductory books. > Everyone tries to combine the tutorial with the reference these days and > ends up with something that doesn't quite work for either purpose. And > none deal with the fact that you have to understand what the shell is > going to do with your command line before you will be very good at > understandin a man page for any other tool. > >> Perl's slogan: There's more than one way to do it. > > Yes, but if you start wrong you'll probably end up wrong. Possible. But hand-holding can only go so far. >> oh, I forgot, emacs macros can do this too. Don't know of any gui >> tools that are worth having. > > Try eclipse sometime. For mangling text??!! I think your example is way off topic for this thread. Or for programming in a large environment? Possible, but not pertinent to this email thread. Ken