Chapter 21. You Can't Quite Call This Editing

Summary Box There are many specialized forms of editing that happen frequently enough that they sometimes want to be saved into a script. Examples of this kind of thing include:   fmt (Section 21.2) and related scripts (Section 21.3) for reformatting jagged lines into neat paragraphs recomment (Section 21.4), a script for reformatting comment blocks within programs and scripts behead (Section 21.5), a script for removing the headers from mail and news messages center (Section 21.8), a script for centering lines of text in a file In addition, there are a number of programs that provide some useful ways of modifying files but that you don't normally think of as editors:   split (Section 21.9) and csplit (Section 21.10) let you split a big file into smaller pieces. tr (Section 21.11) lets you substitute one character for another -- including non-printing characters that you specify by their octal values. dd (Section 21.6, Section 21.13) lets you perform various data conversions on a file. cut (Section 21.14) lets you cut columns or fields out of a file, and paste (Section 21.18) lets you put them back, perhaps in a different order. This chapter covers all that and more.   -- TOR