Linux tools for text processing (COMPLECS)

Many computational and data processing workloads require pre-processing of input files to get the data into a format that is compatible with the user’s application and/or post-processing of output files to extract key results for further analysis. While these operations could be done by hand, they tend to be time-consuming, tedious and, worst of all, error prone. In this session we cover the Linux tools awk, sed, grep, sort, head, tail, cut, paste, cat and split, which will help users to easily automate repetitive tasks. We conclude by showing how large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT could be used to write commands using these tools.