35.1 And Why Not?

There are many specialized forms of editing that happen frequently enough that they sometimes want to be saved into a script. Examples of this kind of thing include:

• fmt (35.2) and related scripts (35.3) for reformatting jagged lines into neat paragraphs.

• recomment (35.4), a script for reformatting comment blocks within programs and scripts.

• behead (35.5), a script for removing the headers from mail and news messages.

• center (35.8), a script for centering lines of text in a file.

In addition, there are a number of programs that provide some useful ways of modifying files but that you don't normally think of as editors:

• split (35.9) and csplit (35.10) let you split a big file into smaller pieces.

• tr (35.11) lets you substitute one character for another - including non-printing characters that you specify by their octal values.

• dd (35.6, 35.12, 35.13) lets you perform various data conversions on a file.

• cut (35.14) and colrm (35.15) let you cut columns or fields out of a file, and paste (35.18) lets you put them back, perhaps in a different order.

This chapter covers all that and more.