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pipe.pl is the Swiss Army knife of text editing on the command line. Over time I have had to write and re-write scripts that do many of the operations in pipe.pl. This script wraps them with a 'simple' API that allows you to do things that are difficult or tedious in higher languages.

Example functions

• Trim arbitrary fields.
• Merge content from another file
• Order and suppress output of arbitrary fields.
• Randomize all, or a specific sample size of the records from input.
• De-duplicate records from input.
• Count non-empty fields from input records.
• Summation over non-empty numeric values of arbitrary fields.
• Sort input lines based on one or more arbitrary fields, numerically or lexical-ly.
• Mask output of specific characters, and range of characters, within arbitrary fields.
• Change case, order, and normalize strings in columns.
• Averages over columns.
• Output line numbers or counts of de-duplicated records.
• Force trailing pipe on output.
• Grep a specific column value with regular expressions.
• Compare columns for differences.
• 'if'-like tests of values in columns..
• Flexibly pad output fields.
• Report maximum and minimum width of column data.
• Output sub strings of values in columns by specific index or range of indices.
• Change case of fields.
• Normalize arbitrary fields to remove quotes, spaces, digits non-digits, etc.
• Flip character value conditionally.
• Convert input into different radix.
• Replace values in columns conditionally.
• Translate values within columns.
• Compute new column values based on values in other columns recursively.
• Sum values over groups.
• Merge columns.
• Increment values in columns.
• Add an auto-increment column.
• Output alternate lines.
• Show regional context of a match. See -g and -G.
• Take input from named file (see -0).
• Compute the delta between lines.
• Histogram values within columns.
• Math over columns.