I've been using *nix for a while, but there are things in here I haven't used (tr, for example, and I haven't used much awk). A nice little diversion, and it's something I'd feel comfortable showing to a newbie if I were nearby to help out.<p>Definitely worth going through, yourself, if you've got some spare time and want to use a little more of your shell.<p>NB: Don't pull up man pages right away (like I did for tr); the author explains things after using them. Which works out pretty well.<p>EDIT1: Additionally, it's fun to rewrite some of these using tools I use more regularly. E.g. replace the first uses of tr with grep. I prefer tr, now, though; it makes more sense to "translate" non letter chars to newlines than to just print all occurrences of a n-letter match.
Some updates to the text:<p>* tail +2 XXXX needs to be tail -n +2 XXXX.<p>* The $$'s in the shell script are problematic. (<a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/78493/what-does-mean-in-the-bash-shell" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/78493/what-does-mean-in-t...</a>)<p>* Do yourself a favour and alias a 'del' command instead of 'rm'. At least del should alias to rm -i. I use 'alias del gvfs-trash' which is like Windows' Recycle Bin.<p>It's interesting, this link has been posted to HN three other times and received only 1 point each time.