Revisiting Some Old Friends
Back in Chapter 6, we learned about some commands that are able to accept standard input in addition to command-line arguments. We touched on them only briefly then, but now we will take a closer look at how they can be used to perform text processing.
cat—Concatenate Files and Print on Standard Output
cat program has a number of interesting options. Many of them are used to better visualize text content. One example is the
-A option, which is used to display non-printing characters in the text. There are times when we want to know if control characters are embedded in our otherwise visible text. The most common of these are tab characters (as opposed to spaces) and carriage returns, often present as end-of-line characters ...