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awk version of 7210. Slightly longer, but expanding it to catch blank lines is easier:
awk 'BEGIN{RS="\0"}{gsub(/\n+/,"<SOMETEXT>");print}' file.txt
This command turns a multi-line file into a single line joined with <SOMETEXT>. To skip blank lines, use:
perl -pe '(eof()||s/^\s*$//)||s/\n/<SOMETEXT>/g' file.txt
Use this BASH trick to create a variable containing the TAB character and pass it as the argument to sort, join, cut and other commands which don't understand the \t notation.
sort -t $'\t' ...
join -t $'\t' ...
cut -d $'\t' ...
There is a common command for outputting a field or list of fields from each line in a file. Why wouldn't you just use cut?
Prints the 4th line and then quits. (Credit goes to flatcap in comments: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/6031/print-just-line-4-from-a-textfile#comment.)
The above is an example of grabbing only the first column. You can define the start and end points specifically by chacater position using the following command:
while read l; do echo ${l:10:40}; done < three-column-list.txt > column-c10-c40.txt
Of course, it doesn't have to be a column, or extraction, it can be replacement
while read l; do echo ${l/foo/bar}; done < list-with-foo.txt > list-with-bar.txt
Read more about parameter expansion here:
http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/syntax/pe
Think of this as an alternative to awk or sed for file operations
using tail first won't do it because tail counts from the bottom of the file. You could do it this way but I don't suggest it
tail -n X | head -n 1
prints a specific line, where X is the line number
The sort utility is well used, but sometimes you want a little chaos. This will randomize the lines of a text file.
BTW, on OS X there is no
| sort -R
option! There is also no
| shuf
These are only in the newer GNU core...
This is also faster than the alternate of:
| awk 'BEGIN { srand() } { print rand() "\t" $0 }' | sort -n | cut -f2-