Text Processing: Part 2

In this section, we will cover:

1. Expanding the toolbox: This section introduces more powerful text processing utilities: grep, sed, and awk, which are essential for advanced pattern matching, filtering, and text manipulation on the Linux command line.
2. grep for pattern matching: The grep command allows you to search for patterns in files and output matching lines. You can perform case-insensitive searches, invert matches, count occurrences, and use regular expressions to refine your searches.
3. sed for stream editing: sed is a non-interactive text editor designed for filtering and transforming text. You can delete, replace, and manipulate specific lines in a file, making it a powerful tool for batch text processing tasks.
4. awk for structured data: awk is a complete scripting language for pattern scanning and processing columns of structured data. It can handle arithmetic, generate reports, and perform logical comparisons, making it ideal for working with CSVs and other structured text files.
5. Efficiency with one-liners: The combination of grep, sed, and awk allows for creating powerful one-liner commands to process large amounts of text quickly, reducing the need for more complex scripts.
6. Regular expressions are key: Regular expressions (regex) play a significant role in refining searches and manipulations in both grep and sed. Understanding basic regex patterns, such as ^ for line start and $ for line end, is crucial for effective text processing.
7. Integration with other tools: Like the tools introduced in Part 1, grep, sed, and awk integrate well with pipes and redirection, allowing you to chain them with other commands for flexible and efficient text workflows.

Getting Started

In the last section, we covered the cat, cut, head, sort, tail, uniq, and wc utilities.

We also learned about the | pipe operator. The pipe operator is used to redirect standard output from one command to a second command. Then the second command can process the output from the first command. An example is:

sort file.txt | uniq

This sorts the lines in a file named file.txt and then prints to standard output only the unique lines Note that files must be sorted before piped to uniq.

We learned about the > and >> redirect operators. They work like the pipe operator, but instead of directing output to a new command, they direct output to a file for saving. As a reminder, the single redirect > overwrites a file or creates a file if it does not exist. The double redirect >> appends to a file or creates a file if it does not exist. It's safer to use the double redirect, but if you are processing large amounts of data, it could also mean creating large files really quickly. If that gets out of hand, then you might crash your system. To build on our prior example, we can add >> to send the output to a new file called output.txt:

sort file.txt | uniq >> output.txt

We have available more powerful utilities and programs to process, manipulate, and analyze text files. In this section, we will cover the following three of these:

• grep : print lines that match patterns
• sed : stream editor for filtering and transforming text
• awk : pattern scanning and text processing language

Grep

The grep command is one of my most often used commands. Basically, grep "prints lines that match patterns" (see man grep). In other words, it's search, and it's super powerful.

grep works line by line. So when we use it to search a file for a string of text, it will return the whole line that matches the string. This line by line idea is part of the history of Unix-like operating systems. It's super important to remember that most utilities and programs that we use on the commandline are line oriented.

"A string is any series of characters that are interpreted literally by a script. For example, 'hello world' and 'LKJH019283' are both examples of strings." -- Computer Hope. More generally, it's the literal characters that we type. It's data.

Let's consider the file operating-systems.csv, as seen below:

OS, License, Year
Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
FreeBSD, BSD, 1993
Linux, GPL, 1991
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008

If we want to search for the string Chrome, we can use grep. Notice that even though the string Chrome only appears once, and in one part of a line, grep returns the entire line.

Command:

grep "Chrome" operating-systems.csv

Output:

Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009

Be aware that, by default, grep is case-sensitive, which means a search for the string chrome, with a lower case c, would return no results. Fortunately, grep has an -i option, which means to ignore the case of the search string. In the following examples, grep returns nothing in the first search since we do not capitalize the string chrome. However, adding the -i option results in success:

Command:

grep "chrome" operating-systems.csv

Output:

None.

Command:

grep -i "chrome" operating-systems.csv

Output:

Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009

We can also search for lines that do not match our string using the -v option. We can combine that with the -i option to ignore the string's case. Therefore, in the following example, all lines that do not contain the string chrome are returned:

Command:

grep -vi "chrome" operating-systems.csv

Output:

FreeBSD, BSD, 1993
Linux, GPL, 1991
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008

I used the tail command in the prior section to show how we might use tail to remove the header (1st line) line in a file. However, it's an odd use of the tail command, which normally just prints the last lines of a file. Instead, we can use grep to remove the first line. To do so, we use what's called a regular expression, or regex for short. Regex is a method used to identify patterns in text via abstractions. They can get complicated, but we can use some easy regex methods.

Let's use a version of the above file with the header line:

Command:

cat operating-systems.csv

Output:

OS, License, Year
Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
FreeBSD, BSD, 1993
Linux, GPL, 1991
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008

To use grep to remove the first line of a file, we can invert our search to select all lines not matching "OS" at the start of a line. Here the carat key ^ is a regex indicating the start of a line. Again, this grep command returns all lines that do not match the string os at the start of a line, ignoring case:

Command:

grep -vi "^os" operating-systems.csv

Output:

Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
FreeBSD, BSD, 1993
Linux, GPL, 1991
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008

Alternatively, since we know that the string Year comes at the end of the first line, we can use grep to invert a search for that. Here the dollar sign key $ is a regex indicating the end of a line. Like the above, this grep command returns all lines that do not match the string year at the end of a line, ignoring case:

Command:

grep -vi "year$" operating-systems.csv

Output:

Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
FreeBSD, BSD, 1993
Linux, GPL, 1991
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008

The man grep page lists other options, but a couple of other good ones include:

Get a count of the matching lines with the -c option:

Command:

grep -ic "proprietary" operating-systems.csv

Output:

4

Print only the match and not the whole line with the -o option:

Command:

grep -io "proprietary" operating-systems.csv

Output:

Proprietary
Proprietary
Proprietary
Proprietary

We can simulate a Boolean OR search, and print lines matching one or both strings using the -E option. We separate the strings with a vertical bar |. This is similar to a Boolean OR search since there's at least one match in the following string, there is at least one result.

Here is an example where only one string returns a true value:

Command:

grep -Ei "bsd|atari" operating-systems.csv

Output:

FreeBSD, BSD, 1993

Here's an example where both strings evaluate to true:

Command:

grep -Ei "bsd|gpl" operating-systems.csv

Output:

FreeBSD, BSD, 1993
Linux, GPL, 1991

By default, grep will return results where the string appears within a larger word, like OS in macOS.

Command:

grep -i "os" operating-systems.csv

Output:

OS, License, Year
Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001

However, we might want to limit results so that we only return results where OS is a complete word. To do that, we can surround the string with special characters:

Command:

grep -i "\<os\>" operating-systems.csv

Output:

OS, License, Year
Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009

Sometimes we want the context for a result. That is, we might want to print lines that surround our matches. For example, print the matching line plus the two lines after the matching line using the -A NUM option:

Command:

grep -i "chrome" -A 2 operating-systems.csv

Output:

Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
FreeBSD, BSD, 1993
Linux, GPL, 1991

Or, print the matching line plus the two lines before the matching line using the -B NUM option:

Command

grep -i "android" -B 2 operating-systems.csv

Output:

macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008

We can combine many of the variations. Here I search for the whole word BSD, case insensitive, and print the line before and the line after the match:

Command:

grep -i -A 1 -B 1 "\<bsd\>" operating-systems.csv

Output:

Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
FreeBSD, BSD, 1993
Linux, GPL, 1991

grep is very powerful, and there are more options listed in its man page.

Note that I enclose my search strings in double quotes. For example: grep "search string" filename.txt It's not always required to enclose a search string in double quotes, but it's good practice because if your string contains more than one word or empty spaces, the search will fail.

Sed

sed is a type of non-interactive text editor that filters and transforms text (man sed). By default sed works on standard output, and edits can be redirected (> or >>) to new files or made in-place using the -i option.

Like the other utilities and programs we've covered, including grep, sed works line by line. But unlike grep, sed provides a way to address specific lines or ranges of lines, and then run filters or transformations on those lines. Once lines in a text file have been identified or addressed, sed offers commands to filter or transform the text at those specific lines.

This concept of the line address is important, but not all text files are explicitly line numbered. Below I use the nl command to number lines in our file, even though the contents of the file do not actually display line numbers:

Command:

nl operating-systems.csv

Output:

     1	OS, License, Year
     2	Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
     3	FreeBSD, BSD, 1993
     4	Linux, GPL, 1991
     5	iOS, Proprietary, 2007
     6	macOS, Proprietary, 2001
     7	Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
     8	Android, Apache, 2008

After we've identified the lines in a file that we want to edit, sed offers commands to filter, transform, or edit the text at the line addresses. Some of these commands include:

• a : appending text
• c : replace text
• d : delete text
• i : inserting text
• p : print text
• r : append text from file
• s : substitute text
• = : print the current line number

Let's see how to use sed to print line numbers instead of using the nl command. To do so, we use the equal sign = to identify line numbers. Note that it places the line numbers just above each line:

Command:

sed '=' operating-systems.csv

Output:

1
OS, License, Year
2
Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
3
FreeBSD, BSD, 1993
4
Linux, GPL, 1991
5
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
6
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
7
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
8
Android, Apache, 2008

In the last section, we used the tail command to remove the header line of our file. Above, we used grep to accomplish this task. It's much easier to use sed to remove the header line of the operating-systems.csv. We simply specify the line number (1) and then use the delete command (d). Thus, we delete line 1 with the command below. As long as we don't use the -i operator, we don't change the actual file.

Command:

sed '1d' operating-systems.csv

Output:

Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
FreeBSD, BSD, 1993
Linux, GPL, 1991
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008

Note that I use single apostrophes for the sed command. This is required.

If I wanted to make that a permanent deletion, then I would use the -i option, which means that I would edit the file in-place (see man sed):

Command:

sed -i '1d' operating-systems.csv

To refer to line ranges, I add a comma between addresses. Therefore, to edit lines 1, 2, and 3:

Command:

sed '1,3d' operating-systems.csv

Output:

Linux, GPL, 1991
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008

I can use sed to find and replace strings. The syntax for this is:

sed 's/regexp/replacement/' filename.txt

The regexp part of the above command is where I place regular expressions. Simple strings like words work here, too, since they are treated as regular expressions themselves.

In the next example, I use sed to search for the string "Linux", and replace it with the string "GNU/Linux":

Command:

sed 's/Linux/GNU\/Linux/' operating-systems.csv

Output:

OS, License, Year
Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
FreeBSD, BSD, 1993
GNU/Linux, GPL, 1991
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008

Because the string GNU/Linux contains a forward slash, and because sed uses the forward slash as a separator, note that I escaped the forward slash with a back slash. This escape tells sed to interpret the forward slash in GNU/Linux literally and not as a special sed character.

If we want to add new rows to the file, we can append a or insert i text after or at specific lines:

To append text after line 3, use a:

Command:

sed '3a FreeDOS, GPL, 1998' operating-systems.csv

Output:

OS, License, Year
Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
FreeBSD, BSD, 1993
FreeDOS, GPL, 1998
Linux, GPL, 1991
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008

To insert at line 3, use i:

Command:

sed '3i CP\/M, Proprietary, 1974' operating-systems.csv

Output:

OS, License, Year
Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
CP/M, Proprietary, 1974
FreeBSD, BSD, 1993
Linux, GPL, 1991
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008

Note that the FreeDOS line doesn't appear in the last output. This is because I didn't use the -i option nor did I redirect output to a new file. If we want to edit the file in-place, that is, save the edits, then the commands would look like so:

sed -i '3a FreeDOS, GPL, 1998' operating-systems.csv
sed -i '3i CP\/M, Proprietary, 1974' operating-systems.csv

Instead of using line numbers to specify addresses in a text file, we can use regular expressions as addresses, which may be simple words. In the following example, I use the regular expression 1991$ instead of specifying line 4. The regular expression 1991$ means lines ending with the string 1991. Then I use the s command to start a find and replace. sed finds the string Linux and then replaces that with the string GNU/Linux. I use the back slash to escape the forward slash in GNU/Linux:

Command:

sed '/1991$/s/Linux/GNU\/Linux/' operating-systems.csv

Output:

OS, License, Year
Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
FreeBSD, BSD, 1993
GNU/Linux, GPL, 1991
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008

Here's an example using sed to simply search for a pattern. In this example, I'm interested in searching for all operating systems that were released on or after 2000:

Command:

sed -n '/20/p' operating-systems.csv

Output:

Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Android, Apache, 2008

The above would be equivalent to:

grep "20" operating-systems.csv

sed is much more powerful than what I've demonstrated here, and if you're interested in learning more, there are lots of tutorials on the web. Here are a few good ones:

• Learn to use the Sed text editor
• Sed Introduction
• Sed One-Liners Explained, Part I: File Spacing, Numbering and Text Conversion and Substitution
• sed one-liners
• Sed Tutorial

Awk

awk is a complete scripting language designed for "pattern scanning and processing" text. It generally performs some action when it detects some pattern and is particularly suited for columns of structured data. See man awkfor documentation..

awk works on columns regardless if the contents include structured data (like a CSV file) or not (like a letter or essay). If the data is structured, then that means the data will be formatted in some way. In the last few sections, we have looked at a CSV file. This is structured data because the data points in this file are separated by commas.

For awk to work with columns in a file, it needs some way to refer to those columns. In the examples below, we'll see that columns in a text file are referred to by a dollar sign and then the number of the column $n. So, $1 indicates column one, $2 indicates column two, and so on. If we use $0, then we refer to the entire file. In our example text file, $1 indicates the OS Name column, $2 indicates the License column, $3 indicates the release Year column, and $0 indicates all columns.

The syntax for awk is a little different than what we've seen so far. Basically, awk uses the following syntax, where pattern is optional.

awk pattern { action statements }

Let's see some examples.

To print the first column of our file, we do not need the pattern part of the command but only need to state an action statement within curly braces. In the command below, the action statement is '{ print $1 }'.

Command:

awk '{ print $1 }' operating-systems.csv

Output:

OS,
Chrome
FreeBSD,
Linux,
iOS,
macOS,
Windows
Android,

By default, awk considers the first empty space as the field delimiter. That's why in the command above only the term Windows and Chrome appear in the results even though it should be Windows NT and Chrome OS. It's also why we see commas in the output. To fix this, we tell awk to use a comma as the field separator, instead of the default empty space. To specify that we want awk to treat the comma as a field delimiter, we use the -F option, and we surround the comma with single quotes:

Command:

awk -F',' '{ print $1 }' operating-systems.csv

Output:

OS
Chrome OS
FreeBSD
Linux
iOS
macOS
Windows NT
Android

By specifying the comma as the field separator, our results are more accurate, and the commas no longer appear either.

Like grep and sed, awk can do search. In this next example, I print the column containing the string Linux. Here I am using the pattern part of the command: '/Linux/'.

Command:

awk -F',' '/Linux/ { print $1 }' operating-systems.csv

Output:

Linux

Note how awk does not return the whole line but only the match.

With awk, we can retrieve more than one column, and we can use awk to generate reports. This was part of the original motivation to create this language.

In the next example, I select columns two and one in that order, which is something the cut command cannot do. I also add a space between the columns using the double quotes to surround an empty space. Then I modified the field delimiter to include both a comma and a space to get the output that I want:

Command:

awk -F', ' '{ print $2 " " $1 }' operating-systems.csv

Output:

License OS
Proprietary Chrome OS
BSD FreeBSD
GPL Linux
Proprietary iOS
Proprietary macOS
Proprietary Windows NT
Apache Android

I can make output more readable by adding text to print:

Command:

awk -F',' '{ print $1 " was released in" $3 "." }' operating-systems.csv

Output:

OS was released in Year.
Chrome OS was released in 2009.
FreeBSD was released in 1993.
Linux was released in 1991.
iOS was released in 2007.
macOS was released in 2001.
Windows NT was released in 1993.
Android was released in 2008.

Since awk is a full-fledged programming language, it understands data structures, which means it can do math or work on strings of text. Let's illustrate this by doing some math or logic on column 3.

Here I print all of column three:

Command:

awk -F',' '{ print $3 }' operating-systems.csv

Output:

 Year
 2009
 1993
 1991
 2007
 2001
 1993
 2008

Next I print only the parts of column three that are greater than 2005, and then pipe | the output through the sort command to sort the numbers in numeric order:

Command:

awk -F',' '$3 > 2005 { print $3 }' operating-systems.csv | sort

Output:

 2007
 2008
 2009

If I want to print only the parts of column one where column three equals to 2007, then I would run this command:

Command:

awk -F',' '$3 == 2007 { print $1 }' operating-systems.csv

Output:

iOS

If I want to print only the parts of columns one and three where column 3 equals 2007:

Command:

awk -F',' '$3 == 2007 { print $1 $3 }' operating-systems.csv

Output:

iOS 2007

Or, print the entire line where column three equals 2007:

Command:

awk -F',' '$3 == 2007 { print $0 }' operating-systems.csv

Output:

iOS, Proprietary, 2007

I can print only those lines where column three is greater than 2000 and less than 2008:

Command:

awk -F',' '$3 > 2000 && $3 < 2008 { print $0 }' operating-systems.csv

Output:

iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001

Even though we wouldn't normally sum years, let's print the sum of column three to demonstrate how summing works in awk:

Command:

awk -F',' 'sum += $3 { print sum }' operating-systems.csv

Output:

2009
4002
5993
8000
10001
11994
14002

Here are a few basic string operations. First, print column one in upper case:

Command:

awk -F',' '{ print toupper($1) }' operating-systems.csv

Output:

OS
CHROME OS
FREEBSD
LINUX
IOS
MACOS
WINDOWS NT
ANDROID

Or print column on in lower case:

Command:

awk -F',' '{ print tolower($1) }' operating-systems.csv

Output:

os
chrome os
freebsd
linux
ios
macos
windows nt
android

Or, get the length of each string in column one:

Command:

awk -F',' '{ print length($1) }' operating-systems.csv

Output:

2
9
7
5
3
5
10
7

We can add additional logic. The double ampersands && indicate a Boolean/Logical AND. The exclamation point ! indicates a Boolean/Logical NOT. In the next example, I print only those lines where column three is greater than 1990, and the line has the string "BSD" in it:

Command:

awk -F',' '$3 > 1990 && /BSD/ { print $0 }' operating-systems.csv

Output:

FreeBSD, BSD, 1993

Now I reverse that, and print only those lines where column three is greater than 1990 and the line DOES NOT have the string "BSD" in it:

Command:

awk -F',' '$3 > 1990 && !/BSD/ { print $0 }' operating-systems.csv

Output:

Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
Linux, GPL, 1991
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008

The double vertical bar || indicates a Boolean/Logical OR. The next command prints only those lines that contain the string "Proprietary" or the string "Apache", or it would print both if both strings were in the text:

Command:

awk -F',' '/Proprietary/ || /Apache/ { print $0 }' operating-systems.csv

Output:

Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008

I can take advantage of regular expressions. If I needed to analyze a large file and wasn't sure that some fields would be upper or lower case, then I could use regular expressions to consider both possibilities. That is, by adding [pP] and [aA], awk will check for both the words Proprietary and proprietary, and Apache and apache.

Command:

awk -F',' '/[pP]roprietary/ || /[aA]pache/ { print $0 }' operating-systems.csv

Output:

Chrome OS, Proprietary, 2009
iOS, Proprietary, 2007
macOS, Proprietary, 2001
Windows NT, Proprietary, 1993
Android, Apache, 2008

awk is full-fledged programming language. It provides conditionals, control structures, variables, etc., and so I've only scratched the surface. If you're interested in learning more, then check out some of these tutorials:

• Awk Command
• Awk One-Liners Explained, Part I: File Spacing, Numbering and Calculations
• Awk Tutorial
• How To Become a 10x Engineer using the Awk Command
• Linux/BSD command line wizardry: Learn to think in sed, awk, and grep
• Understanding AWK

Conclusion

The Linux command line offers a lot of utilities to examine data. Prior to this lesson, we covered a few of them that helped us get parts of a file and then pipe those parts through other commands or redirect output to files. We can use pipes and redirects with grep, sed, and awk. If needed, we may be able to avoid using the basic utilities like cut, wc, etc if want to learn more powerful programs like grep, sed, and awk.

It's fun to learn and practice these. Despite this, you do not have to become a sed or an awk programmer. Like the utilities that we've discussed in prior lectures, the power of programs like these is that they are easy to use as one-liners. If you want to get started, the resources listed above can guide you.