Regular Expressions on the Command Line at UNSW Kensington

Would you like to use regular expressions with the classic command line utilities find, grep, sed and awk? These venerable Unix utilities allow you to search, filter and transform large amounts of text (including many common data formats) efficiently and repeatably.

You'll learn how to use:

• find to locate files and directories matching regexes.

• grep to filter lines in files based on pattern matches.

• sed to find and replace using regular expressions and captures.

• awk to work with row- and column-oriented data.

Prerequisites

This course assumes prior knowledge of the basic syntax of regular expressions. If you're new to regular expressions or would like a refresher, take our Mastering text with Regular Expressions course first.

This course also assumes basic familiarity with the Bash command line environment found on GNU/Linux and other Unix-like environments. Take our Unix Shell and Command Line Basics course to get up to speed quickly.

The Intersect approach to training

At Intersect, we work closely with our member universities to develop and deliver training that targets the day-to-day software and technology problems that researchers face. We deliver hands-on courses in a relaxed setting with knowledgeable, helpful trainers who are themselves researchers and who know how researchers work.

For more information about this course and others, see our course catalogue, or visit Learn.intersect.org.au