command line data analysis

[Jonathan]

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ad_Hoc_Dat ... mmand_Line

I always forget about cut and uniq. I've never used join.

I ought to pick up R, too.

[quantus]

I used to use perl'ish version of these at my previous job when I was doing a LOT of table manipulation. It had nice support for automatically using table headers to allow operations to be done by one or more column names, like query, join, sort, uniq and union (outer join). This allowed us to not care about column order although you could use shorthand and do joins and uniqs on the first column if none were specified. Now, I mostly do perl with -ne or -pe to do stuff since the files/data are much less structured. Command line Perl is a must for everyone, even my wife!