Questions tagged [text-processing]
Manipulation or examining of text by programs, scripts, etc.
8,526 questions
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find awk grep - search and replace & passing modified contents to awk to overwrite the existing file
I have a folder with many subfolders full of various Quarto(reg) files & in those files there are links that are located in varying positions in the file lines.
UPDATE ON 3 November 2025 in ...
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7
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9
answers
712
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How to get every lines between nth and (n+1)th match of grep in text file
I've got a text file containing e.g.
Success
Something
Anything
Success
Somebody
Anybody
Someone
Success
(line 8 is deliberately an empty line) and I would like to export every line between the nth ...
- 73
4
votes
4
answers
461
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How can I find common prefixes in file names to group them?
I would like to be able to find all files in multiple directories whose file names start with the same string, but preferably not if that string is only one word or contains fewer than perhaps 5 ...
- 4,443
3
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2
answers
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Embedded special characters skewing sed output
The Issue
I've been parsing a file with sed trying to tweeze out the desired data. This has worked fine for most lines in the file but there appears to be some embedded special characters that are ...
- 33
4
votes
4
answers
485
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Remove new lines and everything after comment symbol with awk or sed
How to remove comments and newline symbols without using two pipes.
I have bookmarks.txt file with comments.
https://cookies.com # recipes cookbook
https://magicwands.com # shopping
I can copy link ...
- 133
5
votes
5
answers
378
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Compare files and combine rows with matching values based on last column
I'm working with several files which come in bundle of four, across groups the bundels have the same number of columns; see below for an example showing the first four rows with header:
File1 has ...
- 323
2
votes
1
answer
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Tmux pane with long-running session using wrong character set?
Today I connected to a long-running process in tmux over ssh for work, to find that the pane the process was running in seems to have started using the wrong character encoding for its output, leading ...
- 125
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1
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How to do non-greedy multiline capture with recent versions of pcre2grep?
I noticed a difference in behavior between an older pcre2grep version (10.22) and a more recent one (10.42), and I am wondering how I can get the old behavior back.
Take the following file:
aaa
bbb
...
- 2,019
2
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1
answer
99
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Redirect `rtf` output to file
System Info
alinuxchap@libertus-desktop:/usr/share/X11/xkb $ uname -a
Linux libertus-desktop 6.12.25+rpt-rpi-v8 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 1:6.12.25-1+rpt1 (2025-04-30) aarch64 GNU/Linux
alinuxchap@...
- 53
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7
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How to find numbers in a textfile that are not divisible by 4096, round them up and write new file?
In Linux there is a file numbers.txt.
It contains a few numbers, all separated with space.
There are numbers like this: 5476089856 71788143 9999744134 114731731 3179237376
In this example only the ...
- 241
3
votes
5
answers
717
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Randomly pick single line from multiple lines while assigning value to environment variable
In a certain script that we run routinely we configure hostnames in environment variables. Since hostnames can change overtime, we try to dynamically pick the current set of hosts using linux's ...
- 359
1
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7
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341
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Extracting paragraphs with awk
What is the correct way to extract paragraphs in this log file using awk:
$ cat log.txt
par1, line1
par1, line2
par1, line3
par1, line4
par1, line5
par1, last line
par2, line1
...
- 2,004
2
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5
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formatting git log messages for later processing
I am trying to format and connect git log messages for later processing.
I am using git log --pretty=format:'%H %s' to get commit hash and the complete message at the moment.
I need commit messages to ...
- 359
2
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3
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224
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How to extract specific fields from systemctl output for a custom report
I would like to build a report coming from the output of certain commands.
For instance, I have the output of such command:
systemctl --type=service --state=running |
grep -e cron -e apache2 -e ...
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1
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3
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131
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edit all the values in a specific column based on row numbers range
I have a PDB file (coordinates of atoms in a protein) on a Linux machine:
ATOM 1 N GLY A 1 0.535 51.766 5.682 1.00 0.00
ATOM 2 CA GLY A 1 -0.712 50....
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