Hello!

I am pleased to announce a new version of my CLI text processing with GNU Coreutils ebook. Examples, descriptions and external links were updated/corrected and 100+ exercises were added.

You might be already aware of popular coreutils commands like head, tail, tr, sort and so on. This book will teach you more than twenty of such specialized text processing tools provided by the GNU coreutils package.


Release offers🔗

To celebrate the new release, you can download PDF/EPUB versions of the ebook for FREE till 10-April-2024. You can still pay if you wish ;)

The following bundles are heavily discounted:


What's new?🔗

  • GNU coreutils package version updated to 9.1
  • Added 100+ exercises
  • In general, many of the examples, descriptions and external links were updated/corrected
  • Updated Acknowledgements section
  • Code snippets related to info/warning sections will now appear as a single block
  • Book title changed to CLI text processing with GNU Coreutils
  • New cover image

Videos🔗

On this blog, I post tips covering Python, command line tools and Vim. Here are video demos for these tips:


Testimonials🔗

In my opinion the book does a great job of quickly presenting examples of how commands can be used and then paired up to achieve new or interesting ways of manipulating data. Throughout the text there are little highlights offering tips on extra functionality or limitations of certain commands. For instance, when discussing the shuf command we're warned that shuf will not work with multiple files. However, we can merge multiple files together (using the cat command) and then pass them to shuf. These little gems of wisdom add a dimension to the book and will likely save the reader some time wondering why their scripts are not working as expected.

— book review by Jesse Smith on distrowatch.com

I discovered your books recently and they’re awesome, thank you! As a 20 year *nix they made me realize how much more there are to these rock solid and ancient tools, once you spend the time to actually learn the intricacies of them.

— feedback on reddit


Table of Contents🔗

  1. Preface
  2. Introduction
  3. cat and tac
  4. head and tail
  5. tr
  6. cut
  7. seq
  8. shuf
  9. paste
  10. pr
  11. fold and fmt
  12. sort
  13. uniq
  14. comm
  15. join
  16. nl
  17. wc
  18. split
  19. csplit
  20. expand and unexpand
  21. basename and dirname
  22. What next?

Web version🔗

You can also read the book online here: https://learnbyexample.github.io/cli_text_processing_coreutils/introduction.html.


GitHub repo🔗

Visit https://github.com/learnbyexample/cli_text_processing_coreutils for markdown source, example files, exercise solutions, sample chapters and other details related to the book.

info See also my blog post on how to customize pandoc for generating beautiful PDF/EPUB versions from GitHub style markdown.


Newsletter🔗

Subscribe to learnbyexample weekly — free newsletter covering programming resources, updates on what I am creating, tools, free ebooks and more, delivered every Friday.


Feedback and Errata🔗

I would highly appreciate it if you'd let me know how you felt about this book. It could be anything from a simple thank you, Gumroad rating, pointing out a typo, mistakes in code snippets, which aspects of the book worked for you (or didn't!) and so on. Reader feedback is essential and especially so for self-published authors.

You can reach me via:

Happy learning :)