Re: UNIX tips for SWARM FAQ. Please Contribute, prove your team spirit!

[Jan Kreft]

Hi all,

though a Unix newbie I feel tempted to contribute a little to this FAQ.

locate:

I use locate instead of find because I don't have to remember any syntax
and locate is much faster so you don't waste time if you made a typo and
have to repeat the search. The downside is you have to tell cron once to
update the database for locate daily. 

locate .gif will print all the gif pictures you have on your disk in an
instant. Very nice.


uniq, join, cut, grep (of course!)

I use these filters to handle the data output of my simulations. 

join lets you join several files (all or only the specified columns). If
you have a log file for every graph and several graphs, you can join the
non-redundant columns together.

uniq lets you throw away all repeating lines. If your graph looks like a
histogram, you can extract the lines defining the edges.

cut lets you extract columns from a file.

grep is very useful again to extract info linewise from a large data log
file. You can grep all occurences of, say, growthRate in your log file and
then pipe it to cut to get the second columns, containing the numbers,
only. 

All the resulting files can be fed into a spreadsheet etc.

My $.02,

Jan.


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