Authors: 

Gabriel A. Weaver and Sean W. Smith, Dartmouth College

Abstract: 

Traditional Unix tools operate on sequences of characters, bytes, fields, lines, and files. However, modern practitioners often want to manipulate files in terms of a variety of language-specific constructs—C functions, Cisco IOS interface blocks, and XML elements, to name a few. These language-specific structures quite often lie beyond the regular languages upon which Unix textprocessing tools can practically compute. In this paper, we propose eXtended Unix text-processing tools (xutools) and present implementations that enable practitioners to extract (xugrep ), count (xuwc ), and compare (xudiff ) texts in terms of language-specific structures. We motivate, design, and evaluate our tools around real-world use cases from network and system administrators, security consultants, and software engineers from a variety of domains including the power grid, healthcare, and education.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {180342,
author = {Gabriel A. Weaver and Sean W. Smith},
title = {{XUTools}: Unix Commands for Processing {Next-Generation} Structured Text},
booktitle = {26th Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA 12)},
year = {2012},
isbn = {978-931971-97-3},
address = {San Diego, CA},
pages = {83--99},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa12/technical-sessions/presentation/weaver},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = dec
}

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