Textutils

The GNU Text Utilities are the basic text-manipulation utilities of the GNU operating system.

Fileutils, Shellutils, and Textutils have been combined into the GNU Coreutils package. All further development and discussion is now taking place as Coreutils. The last separate versions were fileutils-4.1.11, textutils-2.1, and sh-utils-2.0.15. The first major release of coreutils-5.0 was announced on Fri, 4 April 2003.

Please refer to the new coreutils home page at http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/ for more information.

Everyone is encouraged to update to the latest stable version of coreutils. However it is known that several distributions which released and shipped prior to the coreutils release were shipped with the previous stable versions of the individual fileutils, shellutils, and textutils packages. Those distributing these utilities are encouraged to update to coreutils at the time of their next major update.

The tools supplied with this package are:

cat - concatenate files and print to the standard output
cksum - checksum and count the bytes in a file
comm - compare two sorted files line by line
csplit - split a file into sections determined by context lines
cut - remove sections from each line of files
expand - convert tabs to spaces
fmt - simple optimal text formatter
fold - wrap each input line to fit in specified width
join - join lines of two files on a common field
md5sum - compute and check MD5 message digest
nl - number lines of files
od - dump files in octal and other formats
paste - merge lines of files
pr - convert text files for printing
ptx - produce a permuted index of file contents
sort - sort lines of text files
split - split a file into pieces
sum - checksum and count the blocks in a file
tac - concatenate and print files in reverse
tail - output the last part of files
tr - translate or delete characters
tsort - perform topological sort
unexpand - convert spaces to tabs
uniq - remove duplicate lines from a sorted file
wc - print the number of bytes, words, and lines in files
head - output the first part of files

Online Manual

The manual is available in the info system of the GNU Operating System. Use info to access the top level info page. Use info Text to access the Text Utilities section directly.

Please see http://www.gnu.org/manual/ for a list of manuals available from the GNU Project. Please see http://www.gnu.org/software/textutils/manual/textutils/textutils.html for the 4.2 manual.

Frequently Asked Questions

Please check the FAQ for the core utilities for answers to your most frequently asked questions. This FAQ contains answers to questions asked on the mailing lists and newsgroups.

Downloading

The latest version of fileutils is now included in the coreutils package. Please refer to the coreutils page for downloading information.

How to Get Help

For general discussion of bugs in the utilities the news group gnu.utils.bug is probably the most appropriate forum. An archive of the bug report mailing list is available at http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-textutils/. An archive of the coreutils bug report mailing list is available at http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/.

How to Help

To contact the maintainers, either to report a bug or to contribute fixes or improvements, send mail to bug-coreutils@gnu.org.

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Updated: $Date: 2003/10/22 02:17:14 $