Maybe you want to run a Windows software on Linux? Or optimize your costs by running several virtual servers on the same hardware? In those cases, like in many other ones, virtualization is the technology to leverage.
Moving files scattered among several sub-directories could be a boring and time-consuming task if you only rely on your mouse & the graphical user interface of your system.
My wife wanted to create a photo-book using a popular web site. Unfortunatelly, the .JPE files produced by our camera were rejected. We had to change their extension to .JPG for the web site to process them. Annoying waste of time ? Not that much if you know the prename command !
If you work with text data files, you might have some cleanup to do before processing them. It can be reordering columns. Discarding unused data. Or fixing formating. Those are tasks the standard tool Awk shines at. So don’t wait to discover it in this video !
Extracting the interesting data from a large dataset is a very common task. For very very VERY large datasets, there are entire frameworks for that.
It is not uncommon to have to apply similar changes to a set of many different files. For example, a programmer might want to insert some license text on top of each source file of a project. Or one might want to update the copyright notice on all pages of a static website.
If you can go beyond the most basic use cases, the sed substitution command will give you a tremendous amount of power to process and transform your text files.
sed
