learnbyexample
Hello!
I am pleased to announce a new version of my CLI text processing with GNU Coreutils ebook. This ebook will help you learn 20+ specialized text processing commands provided by the coreutils package.
This book heavily leans on examples to present features one by one. Exercises at the end of chapters will help you practice what you've learned and solutions are also provided for reference. External links are provided for further reading.
Links:
- Free PDF/EPUB: https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/cli_coreutils (till 10-Apr-2024)
- Web version: https://learnbyexample.github.io/cli_text_processing_coreutils/
- Markdown source, exercise solutions, etc: https://github.com/learnbyexample/cli_text_processing_coreutils
- Short video about the book: https://youtu.be/oCnJLu_PUbY
- Interactive TUI app: https://github.com/learnbyexample/TUI-apps/tree/main/CLI-Exercises (includes some coreutils exercises)
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, 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.
Happy learning :)
I have a book for Perl One-Liners as well, which I'm currently revising :)
I've written books on regex too, if you are interested in learning ;)
Thanks a lot for the feedback on Coreutils book! It's so nice to hear that it helped in your thesis.
Regarding the ebook versions, I use pandoc to convert GitHub style Markdown to PDF/EPUB (wrote a blog post about my process here: https://learnbyexample.github.io/customizing-pandoc/). I had to search through stackexchange threads to customize the few things I could. I don't know how to fix the kind of page breaks you mentioned. But, I'll try to find a solution. Thanks again for the feedback :)
Hope you find the book useful :)
I'd also suggest these shorter guides to get started:
See also:
- tldr โ collection of community-maintained help pages for command-line tools
- explainshell โ write down a command-line to see the help text that matches each argument
- General purpose command-line tools โ examples for most common usecases
- Bash reference cheatsheet โ nicely formatted and explained well
- Bash scripting cheatsheet โ quick reference to getting started with Bash scripting
You can do it in Bash as well. Put this in .inputrc:
"\e[A":history-substring-search-backward
"\e[B":history-substring-search-forward
# or, if you want to search only from the start of the command
"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
Inspired by explainshell, I wrote a script (https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help) to be used from the terminal itself. It is a bit buggy, but works well most of the time. For example:
$ ch grep -Ao
grep - print lines that match patterns
-A NUM, --after-context=NUM
Print NUM lines of trailing context after matching lines. Places a
line containing a group separator (--) between contiguous groups of
matches. With the -o or --only-matching option, this has no effect
and a warning is given.
-o, --only-matching
Print only the matched (non-empty) parts of a matching line, with
each such part on a separate output line.
I use GVim for coding and text editing in general.
Programming wise, CLI tools (grep, sed, awk, sort, head, etc) are enough for most of my tasks. I've written a few Python TUI projects (uses Textual framework) but these are around 300-400 lines, so Vim is more than enough for my purposes. Don't even need any plugins.
https://github.com/WyattBlue/auto-editor - automatically editing video and audio by analyzing a variety of methods, most notably audio loudness
https://github.com/shssoichiro/oxipng, https://pngquant.org/ and https://github.com/RazrFalcon/svgcleaner for optimizing images
EPUB reader