Summary

In this lesson we touched on some of the more obscure and specialized file management commands contained within Unix's command-line toolkit. Commands such as wc and split can help you perform word counts, break up your files, and reassemble your files. You learned of diff and split, which are used to help you do file size comparisons and updates with ease. Lastly, we spent some time working through a small exercise meant to show you how to use file management commands in sequence. We also reviewed most (if not all) the basic file management commands and how they can work together. Review the lessons and make up your own tests and drills and you will be a Unix pro in no time! Here's a review of what was learned in this lesson:

• wc The wc command can provide quick character, line, and word counts for a single file or for a group of files.

• split If you have files that are a bit too large to handle when sending email, writing to a floppy, and so on, you can use the split command to chop them up into smaller files. split can create files containing a certain number of lines, kilobytes, or megabytes.

• diff/patch The combination of diff and patch enables you to distribute updates (to documents, source code, and so on) in an efficient manner. Rather than sending copies of entire updated files, you can use diff to create patchfiles that only contain the changes between one version of a file and the next.

• File Management Skill Review The combination of all the file management commands you learned is essentially where the power of Unix comes from; the batch automation of many commands added together is how Unix can do anything scripted. It's important to master this idea now, and keep working on it, so that as you progress with Unix, you can combine many cryptic commands at will.