Linux Command Line Interface (CLI) Fundamentals

Analyze Text Files
So hello, and welcome to this course from Pluralsight, my name is Andrew Mallet and I'm going to be your instructor as we look at how we can Analyze Text Files. So analyzing text files in Linux is really just a posh word for reading files, and of course there are many tools that we can use to do that, so we could use cat, head, tail, cut, less, and we can use sort to negotiate it and sort the output. But like anything, making sure that we choose the correct tool, and making sure that it's fit for the purpose to which we want to use. The command Head is used to display the top files from a line, so I could use head -n3 to show me the top 3 lines, in a similar way we can use Tail to look at the end of a file. We can use the tool Sort to organize our data within columns so we can sort it in our alphabetical, or numerical format, and reverse order if necessary. Cut can remove certain columns so we can filter the data and display just the information that we want to focus on. The command Less can be used to page through a longer file, and as with anything sometimes it's knowing the tools to leave behind as well as the tools to use. We're going to start off by looking at Cat and Tac.