In this module, we dive in and cover the simpler tools in roughly their order of increasing complexity: head, tail, wc, expand, tac, paste, nl, tr, sort, shuf, uniq, split and cut. Along the way, we discuss the similarities and differences between the tools, potential pitfalls, limitations and linking tools together to create simple workflows.

This module explores three of the more powerful Linux text processing tools: grep, awk and sed. We start with using grep to find matches in a file. We then cover awk, which is actually a full programming language, but will limit our treatment to one-liners for extracting fields and records from a file. The module concludes with sed, a stream editor that can operate efficiently on arbitrarily large files.

This module introduces regular expressions and the key features such as character classes, quantifiers, groups, anchors, alternation and word boundaries. These features are all covered in the context of grep, but we'll see later that they carry over to awk and sed.

This module continues our discussion or regular expressions, going into some of the more advanced features that are only available in Perl compatible regular expressions, such as lazy matching, lookahead, lookbehind and backreferences. We also show how regexes can be used with awk and sed.

This is the last mandatory module of the course and includes the final exam and some closing remarks.

This module contains the lecture notes used during the production of the videos. This is not required reading and is provided for those who wish to supplement the videos or who find that they learn better from written materials. Unlike the transcripts, these PDFs contain the commands that were executed during the videos. Note that while the videos generally follow the lecture notes, there will not be an exact correspondence between the videos and notes.