Question

Exploring Utilities in linux

1. Describe the steps and command that is required to translate all the characters in a file called May-2014 report from lowercase to uppercase.

2. Describe the steps and command that is required to translate all the blank characters to new line characters (new line character = ‘\n’) in a file called May-2014.

3. Describe the steps and command that are required to change all instances of the work “May” to the word “MAY” in the file called May-2014.

4. You were a given a very large log file that has the colon “:” delimiter present between each of the line values and you want to pull out the 2, 4 and 7 column to a file called “May-2014-parsed”. What are the steps you would take to accomplish this task. Hint: use the awk command.

5. You have two very large log files in your directory from yesterday and the day before and you were wondering what the difference is between them. What command could you run to see the differences between and the file? Please explain the command in a paragraph or less.

Answer 1

1. Lowercase to Uppercase

^{$ tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' < May-2014> May-2014
$ cat May-2014}

2. Translate all the blank characters to new line characters

^{$ tr ' ' '\n' May-2014}

3. Change all instances of the word “May” to the word “MAY”

$ tr 'May' 'MAT' May-2014

4. Pull out the 2, 4 and 7 column to a file called “May-2014-parsed"

$ awk -F ":" '{print $2 $4 $7}' May-2014-parsed

5. Difference between Files