Unix text processing

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1. k310Aug 2026
   In the beginning, there were no "blocks" to build with, so we coded everything in its entirety. Then came a higher order language, and a third and then fourth generation language.

   But at each step, some very basic concepts were needed to work with the new "blocks". I'll give a non-trivial example. Working on a network monitoring system, we had alerts to deal with coming from SNMP. They had to be processed in order to give clear and actionable status.

   So, whatever results come from the newest black box, they need to be processed at a high level in order to do more than inform you of the daily horoscope or whatever.

   The particular software we used evolved from netlabs and we wrote custom handlers in perl, which Larry Wall invented for exactly that purpose if my history is right.

   At one point, I read "Unix Text Processing" not so much for the troff lessons, but for all the working examples of shell commands. That helped me enormously in my work.

   And you can get the book.

   https://github.com/larrykollar/Unix-Text-Processing

   https://ia800506.us.archive.org/12/items/utp_book/utp_book.p...

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2. k310Jun 2026
   Reminds me of the time I booted up a Sun-2 workstation from tape.

   All that was available for text editing was ed. (Surprise!)

   I learned a lot about ed real fast.

   Though this won't happen again, the lesson is "Learn the basics"

   I learned a ton about unix command line utils via the "Unix Text Processing" book, not just troff. We had DWB troff later on, and it really was an education for me. I read in various lab data sets and created reports (with plots) in short order while others were repeatedly and tediously clicking away in Word or other.

   I had no access at the time to fancy mathematical software tools. (recommended, especially FOSS)

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3. k310Apr 2026
   Not very modern, but still a learning tool, Unix Text Processing [0] taught me tons about unix commands and utilities. It provided a foundation for things to come. Even if it's heavily into troff (we had DWB on the work computer) the shell, awk, sed and other commands (Chapter 12) were invaluable. Perl came later!

   > Unix Text Processing (Hayden Books)

   > Unix Text Processing, by Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly, was published by Hayden Books in 1987, back when O'Reilly & Associates wrote technical documentation for hire. Hayden later took the book out of print, but Dale and Tim retained the copyright and have decided to make it available through our web site under Creative Commons' Attribution License.

   > Unix Text Processing is available in the following ways:

       A single PDF file via HTTP [1] and others ...
   

   For what it's worth, I used grap, pic and troff to process lab data, create graphs and insert them into reports. On Sun-2 workstsations!

   [0] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/utp/

   [1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/utp/UnixTextProcessing.pdf (checked)

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4. k310Jan 2026
   I have to think about this. Back in the days when rapid prototyping meant checking things out with (SHUDDER) Basic, or Tcl, or later, Hypercard, I actually learned something along the way that came in very handy later in a different context.

   So, a dumb problem came up --- Really dumb --- how to make the world's simplest online calendar so that someone could just enter event dates (there are less than 10 a month) and not wait until the very last one came in, for an email to go out. Key dates are known and it's the 13th and no January calendar yet.

   So, it's like convert date formats, which Numbers refused to do, and then pair that column with days of the week. Before I went back to the days of "Unix Text Processing" and the insanely useful "paste" command. That came from the days when I studied that book and put a ton of it into practice. It was a guide top shell and built-ins via example.

   Doing this, I thought that perl would solve it all, and despite not having used it in countless years (I retired long ago) it started coming back to me.

   But the shell stuff worked better than a spreadsheet (software from hell) and perl, which can have some incredibly poetic solutions. I promised myself to re-read what I found. Because it's "neat".

   I learned a lot before even usenet and Google, and that has stuck for the most part, because "I had nobody to lean on".

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5. k310Feb 2024
   A great deal can be learned from Unix Text Processing, by Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly (1987) not just about troff, but the other Unix utilities in action, not just man pages or snippets. And all the quoting you need to do!

   TO'R has made it available under Creative Commons' Attribution License.

   https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/utp/

   Also at IA.

   https://archive.org/details/utp_book

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6. k310Jun 2023
   Old-timer here. I learned to use the unix built-ins via Unix Text Processing, Unix Power Tools, and UNIX Relational Database Management. The last of these is a commercial version of Walter Hobbs' work at RAND. The code is avalable at github. https://github.com/ironsmith58/RDB These were a great way to learn shell commands and perl. (and a free database)

   The Wiki Way was the first book on wikis.

   Another book that helped me was "The Addictive Organization" by Anne Wilson Schaef. It's just amazing how common behaviors are that are normally associated with addiction. Principally: Projection and denial.

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