So as you might have guessed I’m a Unix/Linux guy. As such you love certain tools built into both. My favorite editor is vi/vim, and text manipulation with grep, awk and sed is just short of awesome. For example I’m writing a script that checks to see if EMC’s avtar.bin is running and then to grab it’s process ID or PID and then do the nice -n 19 on it. It’ll require a marker of sorts that records date etc.

But it incorporates using the awk utility. With that you can pick out elements of text separated by white space among many other things it can do. Try that in Windows.

Now grep is a searching tool too, if you’re looking for said avtar.bin you just do a ps -ef|grep avtar.bin and you can get all the processes that are avtar.bin.

Now sed is short for stream editor. With it you can essentially change text in a file on the fly using pattern matching. That’s the other powerful thing about Unix and Linux. You can do some really amazingly complex stuff in it just using the tools I’ve mentioned.