On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 13:14, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > On 5/11/2010 11:48 PM, John R. Dennison wrote: >> >> To any on the list *other* than Hadi that I've offended by this >> post you have my most sincere apologies. Sorry for wasting your >> time but this has been building up for a long time. > > You sound like someone who learned the unix toolset back when man(1) had > a hundred entries or so and you could flip through the whole printed > version in an afternoon memorizing the short mnemonic names and their > uses. I suspect it is a lot harder to figure out now that there are > many thousands of programs to pick from and a search for anything will > have millions of irrelevant hits. Of course you could just learn perl > and be done with it since it can do pretty much anything you'd use the > shell and tools for. > > -- > Les Mikesell > lesmikesell at gmail.com 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. Of course, perl, python, ruby, (even tcl!), bash could do all of these things. Now there are ebooks, tutorials, etc that are free that could cover this. Now, it is daunting, sure, but it could be an adventure too. Depends on one's frame of mind. Perl's slogan: There's more than one way to do it. oh, I forgot, emacs macros can do this too. Don't know of any gui tools that are worth having. Too bad we have so many millions of people crippled by Microslop :-( I was there once. Learned by lots of experimentation and lots of reading and lots of questions. Many times the questions were answered by something to the effect of here's a fishing pole, go catch your own fish (or go to the library and get a book on how fish, then make a fishing pole, then go fishing). IMNSHO, Ken Wolcott