[wellylug] yet another simple super basic bash question

[Ewen McNeill]

In message <Pine.LNX.4.61.0412221108100.27980 at localhost>, David Antliff writes:
>On Wed, 22 Dec 2004, Murray Fox wrote:
>> Use rev ;
>
>Ah, another one of those simple yet 
>hard-to-know-it-exists-unless-someone-tells-you programs. Is there a nice 
>comprehensive list of such programs somewhere?

There are entire books devoted to the topic of unix shell programming.
But I'm not aware of an online list-of-all-such-tools.

You can get an approximately with your distributions equivilent of:

dpkg -L textutils shellutils util-linux | grep bin

(and possibly some of the other util.* and .*util.* packages.)

Looking at what busybox offers (http://www.busybox.net/) may also be
useful, as it's intended to be a trivial-replacement for many of those
utilities for use in an embedded system.

The shell itself (especially if it's bash or ksh or similar) also has a
lot of useful built-ins that can be used in various ways to manipulate
text.  (People who do a lot of embedded Unix/embedded Linux development
seem to know them off by hand.)  "man bash" can be useful for finding
out about those builtins, although beware some of them are bash
extensions rather than part of the Bourne shell (sh).

Ewen