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Shell Utilities

Welcome to the Skunkware shell utilities section. This section contains a set of useful programs which can be used to enhance shell scripts, or are full shell interpreters themselves.

Package List

GNU Awk

This is GNU's replacement AWK. GAWK contains all of the features found in nawk, and is completely compatible with all other versions of AWK. GAWK is also considerably faster than the standard awk.

http://skunkware.dev/skunkware/uw7/shellutil/

http://skunkware.dev/skunkware/osr5/shellutil/gawk/

ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/

Pattern scanning and text processing language

Mawk is an interpreter for the AWK Programming Language. The AWK language is useful for manipulation of data files, text retrieval and processing, and for prototyping and experimenting with algorithms. mawk is a new awk meaning it implements the AWK language as defined in Aho, Kernighan and Weinberger, The AWK Programming Language, Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1988. (Hereafter referred to as the AWK book.)

mawk conforms to the Posix 1003.2 (draft 11.3) definition of the AWK language which contains a few features not described in the AWK book, and mawk provides a small number of exten- sions.

http://skunkware.dev/skunkware/uw7/shellutil/

http://skunkware.dev/skunkware/osr5/shellutil/mawk/

ftp://ftp.whidbey.net/pub/brennan/

block-sorting file compressor

Bzip2 compresses files using the Burrows-Wheeler block-sorting text compression algorithm, and Huffman coding. Compression is generally considerably better than that achieved by more conventional LZ77/LZ78-based compressors, and approaches the performance of the PPM family of statistical compressors.

The command-line options are deliberately very similar to those of GNU Gzip, but they are not identical.

http://skunkware.dev/skunkware/uw7/shellutil/bzip2/

http://skunkware.dev/skunkware/osr5/shellutil/bzip2/

http://www.muraroa.demon.co.uk/

http://www.muraroa.demon.co.uk/

GNU File Compression Utilities

GZIP is fast becoming the de-facto standard for file compression under UNIX. Many programs can handle gzip'ed files, and most source code distributions come with the tar files compressed with gzip. gzip can produce files very much smaller than the standard compress utility, and you can control the level of compression you desire. The more you compress, the slower the compression (although decompression is very quick). No system is complete without this package.

http://skunkware.dev/skunkware/uw7/shellutil/gzip/

http://skunkware.dev/skunkware/osr5/shellutil/gzip/

ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/

Identifier database utilities

uw7/shellutil/idutils/

ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/gnu/id-utils/

An "ID database" is a binary file containing a list of file names, a list of tokens, and a sparse matrix indicating which tokens appear in which files.

With this database and some tools to query it, many text-searching tasks become simpler and faster. For example, you can list all files that reference a particular #include file throughout a huge source hierarchy, search for all the memos containing references to a project, or automatically invoke an editor on all files containing references to some function or variable. Anyone with a large software project to maintain, or a large set of text files to organize, can benefit from the ID utilities.

Although the name ID is short for identifier, the ID utilities handle more than just identifiers; they also treat other kinds of tokens, most notably numeric constants, and the contents of certain character strings.

There are several programs in the ID utilities family:

mkid

scans files for tokens and builds the ID database file.

lid

queries the ID database for tokens, then reports matching file names or matching lines.

fid

lists all tokens recorded in the database for given files, or tokens common to two files.

fnid

matches the file names in the database, rather than the tokens.

xtokid

extracts raw tokens--helps with testing of new mkid scanners.

In addition, the ID utilities have historically provided several query programs which are specializations of lid:

gid

(alias for lid -R grep) lists all lines containing the requested pattern.

eid

(alias for lid -R edit) invokes an editor on all files containing the requested pattern, and if possible, initiates a text search for that pattern.

aid

(alias for lid -ils) treats the requested pattern as a case-insensitive literal substring.

Info-Zip .zip file archiver

Info-ZIP is a set of tools designed to be compatible with PK-ZIP(tm). There are two parts to this package: one for creating zip files and another for extracting them.

http://skunkware.dev/skunkware/osr5/shellutil/infozip/

http://skunkware.dev/skunkware/uw7/shellutil/

http://www.cdrom.com/pub/infozip/src/

http://www.cdrom.com/pub/infozip/

less - the opposite of more

less is a replacement pager for more. It allows for scrolling backwards, full regular expression searches, customizable key commands, and many other useful things. It can intelligently display control characters, and is highly recommended.

http://skunkware.dev/skunkware/osr5/shellutil/less/

http://skunkware.dev/skunkware/uw7/shellutil/less/

ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/

GNU Shell Utilities

This package contains the GNU replacement for various shell utilities. The GNU versions of these utilities are typically faster than the standard system utilities, and are more portable. The utilities included in this package are: basename, chroot, date, dirname, echo, env, expr, factor, false, groups, hostname, id, logname, nice, nohup, pathchk, printenv, printf, pwd, sed, seq, sleep, stty, tee, test, true, tty, uname, uptime, users, who, whoami, yes.

http://skunkware.dev/skunkware/osr5/shellutil/sh-utils/

http://skunkware.dev/skunkware/uw7/shellutil/shutils/

http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

http://www.gnu.org/