Hi
Just a simple one but a syntax that I can never remember when I need to so a quick post may help jog mine, and your, memory. This grep syntax is for matching lines from a text file that begin with a particular word or expression :
$ grep -w '^Word' input_file.txt > output_file.txt
Hi
If you’ve ever tried to use ’sed’ to remove the UK pound sign (£) from a file you may have struggled. We were bashing our head against the wall until we tried this little trick :
sed -e 's/'`echo -e "\xA3"`'//g' input.txt > output.txt
Note the important difference between the single-quote and the ‘back-tick’ around the echo.
We had been trying to use the pound sign directly in the terminal window but it just wasn’t matching for some reason. We then used a Hex Editor to find the raw code that was being used to represent the pound sign in the file and used that instead and voila!, it works.
Here’s a little trick we discovered for converting tab delimited text to comma separated (CSV). You’ll need access to a Unix, Linux or Mac OS X machine as it relies on the ‘tr’ command line not present on Windows.
To convert the file simply :
$ tr '\t' ',' < file.tab > file.csv
where ‘file.tab’ is your tab-delimited file and ‘file.csv’ is the file to write to.
And you’re done!
