<story><title>Unix Text Processing (1987)</title><url>http://oreilly.com/openbook/utp/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ralph</author><text>I sought permission from Tim O&apos;Reilly, he co-wrote this back when he was an author, to re-enter the text of the book as troff source, the original being lost. He kindly gave it and volunteers from the groff@gnu.org mailing list split the chapters amongst themselves; it was quite fun. &lt;a href=&quot;http://home.windstream.net/kollar/utp/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://home.windstream.net/kollar/utp/&lt;/a&gt; is the result.</text></comment>
<story><title>Unix Text Processing (1987)</title><url>http://oreilly.com/openbook/utp/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>clicks</author><text>I see resources about Unix text processing utilities, about Bash, about readline shortcuts, etc. etc. submitted very often to HN.&lt;p&gt;Exactly how useful are they? Would you say they&apos;re among the most important skills a programmer could have? Or do we just have a disproportionately large amount of sysadmins for HN readers? Isn&apos;t some general-purpose language like Python or Ruby almost always much better, much faster than these solutions? Isn&apos;t it worth it to rather invest your time learning Python well -- instead of getting familiar to the segregated and messy environment of modern Unix-land? Certainly, the learning curve is much steep for Unix utilities than, say, Python.</text></comment>