Chapter 2: Playing with Files: Viewing, Manipulating, and Editing Text Files

Text files are a mainstay of Unix operating systems. From the password file, /etc/passwd , to server configuration files, such as httpd.conf (exact location varies, depending on the system), a computer’s behavior is controlled by text files. But what is a text file? E-mail and Usenet messages are text files; HTML web pages are text files; shell scripts are text files; log files are text files. Text files are human-readable and can be edited with any text editor. They can, of course, be viewed, manipulated, and edited with shell scripts. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.