4.  Information Handling

o SORT

Sort or merge ASCII files line-by-line. No limit on input size.

O

Sort up or down.

O

Sort lexicographically or on numeric key.

O

Multiple keys located by delimiters or by character position.

O

May sort upper case together with lower into dictionary order.

O

Optionally suppress duplicate data.

o TSORT

Topological sort -- converts a partial order into a total order.

o UNIQ

Collapse successive duplicate lines in a file into one line.

O

Publish lines that were originally unique, duplicated, or both.

O

May give redundancy count for each line.

o TR

Do one-to-one character translation according to an arbitrary code.

O

May coalesce selected repeated characters.

O

May delete selected characters.

o DIFF

Report line changes, additions and deletions necessary to bring two files into agreement.

O

May produce an editor script to convert one file into another.

O

A variant compares two new versions against one old one.

o COMM

Identify common lines in two sorted files. Output in up to 3 columns shows lines present in first file only, present in both, and/or present in second only.

o JOIN

Combine two files by joining records that have identical keys.

o GREP

Print all lines in a file that satisfy a pattern as used in the editor ED.

O

May print all lines that fail to match.

O

May print count of hits.

O

May print first hit in each file.

o LOOK

Binary search in sorted file for lines with specified prefix.

o WC

Count the lines, ``words'' (blank-separated strings) and characters in a file.

o SED

Stream-oriented version of ED. Can perform a sequence of editing operations on each line of an input stream of unbounded length.

O

Lines may be selected by address or range of addresses.

O

Control flow and conditional testing.

O

Multiple output streams.

O

Multi-line capability.

o AWK

Pattern scanning and processing language. Searches input for patterns, and performs actions on each line of input that satisfies the pattern.

O

Patterns include regular expressions, arithmetic and lexicographic conditions, boolean combinations and ranges of these.

O

Data treated as string or numeric as appropriate.

O

Can break input into fields; fields are variables.

O

Variables and arrays (with non-numeric subscripts).

O

Full set of arithmetic operators and control flow.

O

Multiple output streams to files and pipes.

O

Output can be formatted as desired.

O

Multi-line capabilities.