Showing posts with label awk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label awk. Show all posts

Thursday, May 21, 2020

Ubuntu

The benefits of Ubuntu Linux distribution

I bought a new laptop with Ubuntu distribution in September of 2015. I had decided to learn good useful software packages available under it.  

I learned, from beginning, Python 2.7 on it in 2nd half of 2017. Then it was not used for a while. The reason is I bought Windows laptop to learn Python3. And use Excel. I added Power Query and Power BI to it.

Back to Ubuntu distribution. 

But I was determined to use my Ubuntu laptop. So during COVID-19 I started using the functionality available at command prompt. 

Soon I could do copying of files, moving files through simple commands at the prompt. 

I had lots of files, photos on internal drive, external drive, on media card and USB pen drives. I moved all my files in to designated folders. The software has a GUI like windows. But moving files using commands at the prompt is much easier. Also you could set some conditions such copy only newer or updated files. 

I had read about it, but now i experienced it. 

As a next step I learned to write shell scripts to do files management through shell scripts. 

The next part was learning the text processing ability of Linux. Text processing becomes easy with grep, sed, and awk. Regular Expressions is also one has to learn to use these three commands. 

With awk one could work on data with columns and rows and make analysis and prepare reports. 

Here also you could write scripts to automate these tasks. I could write scripts in shell for grep, sed, and awk.

I used pdfgrep to read pdf files. I downloaded pdfgrep. 

I had to learn how to download,  update my packages from central servers using command prompt. Learning to read help files is part of it. 

The power and flexibility of these commands is immense. 

The next stage is to use it for the real world applications. In fact I learned only to work on real world applications. 

I am happy with my progress so far and hope to put it to some good use.