Scribd
Upload
2 views

Text Manipulation

This document is a beginner's guide to text manipulation using command line tools in Linux, specifically Kali Linux. It covers four key tools: grep for searching text, sed for stream editing, cut for extracting sections of text, and awk for complex text processing. Each tool is illustrated with basic usage examples to demonstrate their functionality.

Uploaded by

ronaksharma9983081
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
2 views

Text Manipulation

This document is a beginner's guide to text manipulation using command line tools in Linux, specifically Kali Linux. It covers four key tools: grep for searching text, sed for stream editing, cut for extracting sections of text, and awk for complex text processing. Each tool is illustrated with basic usage examples to demonstrate their functionality.

Uploaded by

ronaksharma9983081
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 4

Text Manipulation

This is the beginner’s guide for how to search the specific texts from the bunch of paragraphs or
files using command line in Linux.

For this demo purpose, I am using Kali Linux.

There are 4 prominent tools which comes to my mind when I think about text manipulation in
linux.

1. grep
2. sed
3. cut
4. awk

Let’s check them one by one and see their basic usage.

1. grep
It searches text files for the occurrence of a given regular expression and outputs any line
containing a match to the standard output.

ls | grep php

First, we can use above simple expression to list down all the files and folders which has “php”
in their name.

Now, you can use any string in the place of “php” for searching.

Next, we can use “-v” option to ignore specific string from the output.
ls | grep -v secret.txt

this above expression will exclude “secret.txt” from the output result.

2. sed
It is a powerful stream editor. At a very high level, sed performs text editing on a stream of text,
either a set of specific files or standard output.

echo "This is a noob Hacker" | sed 's/noob/pro/'

Above command will replace word “noob” with the word “pro”.

3. cut
The cut command is simple, but often comes in quite handy. It is used to extract a section of
text from a line and output it to the standard output. Some of the most commonly-used switches
include -f for the field number we are cutting and -d for the field delimiter.

echo "we are providing web, android, IOT pentesting" | cut -f 3 -d ","

Above command will cut the string using “,” delimiter and print 3rd element from it which is “IOT
pentesting” in our case.
We can use this to extract usernames from “/etc/passwd” file.

4. awk
AWK is a programming language designed for text processing and is typically used as a data
extraction and reporting tool. It is also extremely powerful and can be quite complex

A commonly used switch with awk is -F, which is the field separator, and the print command,
which outputs the result text.

echo "we::are::hackers" | awk -F "::" '{print $1, $3}'

we echoed a line and piped it to awk to extract the first ($1) and third ($3) fields using :: as a
field separator.

The most prominent difference between the cut and awk examples we used is that cut can only
accept a single character as a field delimiter, while awk, is much more flexible. As a general rule
of thumb, when you start having a command involving multiple cut operations, you may want to
consider switching to awk.

You might also like