[CALUG] Best programming app

[Josiah Ritchie]

Learn Regular Expressions (regex) as that multiplies the usefulness of
any good text tool. An online book here has some good material
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz . You can buy Rute's Guide in
paper also.

sort, diff, grep, awk, wc are a good place to start.

Linux Journal just started a shell scripting. First article is in the
MythTV edition and it introducing pipes which is also priceless.
That's the | > < << >> symbols you see in commands.

All priceless functions that make the power of the linux cli over the
"dos prompt" really shine

I had a user with two copies of a large spreadsheet that he couldn't
remember what he'd changed in one and they forgot and changed things
in the other copy. So in the way of a real world example . . .

I exported them both to csv, sorted them to be sure they were in the
same order and used diff to determine where the changes were. Then I
cleaned up the diff output a bit to make it more intelligible to
someone who doesn't know diff, meaning I grep'd the lines again to
remove lines not starting in < or > and then sorted the lines so the >
lines rose to the top.

It probably looked something like this (I don't have Linux available
atm so can't check it):
sort first.csv > one.csv
sort second.csv > two.csv
diff one.csv two.csv | grep -e (^>|^<) | sort > differences.text

The (^<|^>) part is a regexp, indicated by the -e before it. It tells
grep to find any lines that start with either < or >. The ^ indicates
the beginning of the line. The () bring together a collection of
things and the | indicates the break between elements.

grep's input comes in through the | before it and goes out to sort
through the | after it. The > pops the end results of sort into a file
called differences.text.

Some folks more handy than I could probably make this one line instead
of three. Anyone want to mess with that?. I always enjoy a good
disection of my commands. :-)

JSR/

On 11/21/05, Rick Radzville <rradzville at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Wow. I'm an expert microsoftie, linux newbie. This comment is the reason why
> I'm experimenting w/Linux. Jim, would you mind sharing a few more details?
> When you refer to "data", are you talking about "a listing of the
> directories & files on the user's PC" or "a database"?
> v/r,
> Rick Radzville
>
>
> >From: Jim Sansing <jjsansing at comcast.net>
> >To: lug at calug.com
> >Subject: Re: [CALUG] Best programming app
> >Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2005 12:43:17 -0500
> >
> >I don't know about supercharged, but powerful definitely.  I just
> >love showing off in front of the microsofties at work, by pulling
> >their data over to Linux, getting a listing of files and then using vi
> >regexp's and commands to modify it, and giving them back.  All
> >of this takes a couple of minutes in vi, where it would take an
> >hour or more with the best M$ has to offer (whatever that
> >might be).
> >
> >And it seems like I learn a new feature each month.  So as powerful
> >as I have found it to be, I feel like I am using less than half of what
> >it is capable of doing.  So come to think of it, it's really not a stretch
> >to say that by taking full advantage of the PC101 keyboard (vim) and
> >the mouse (gvim) is supercharging the already powerful vi.
> >
> >Later . . .   Jim
> >
> >
> >Bryan Breen wrote:
> > >Dave Dodge wrote:
> > >
> > >>There are plenty of career programmers who work in vi, or one of
> > >>its supercharged variants such as vim.
> > >>
> > >
> > >ROFLMAO! "supercharged"... I do all my web page development and
> > >programming in vim, and that is the last adjective I would have ever
> > >though of to describe it. I'll have a smile on my face for the rest of
> > >the day now. :)
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> > >
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>
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