Unix Utilities in SFU or Cygwin
Some times the easiest way to convert a file is on the command-line.
Traditional Unix tools are available to you, most
easily through
SFU and
Cygwin. Both install standard Unix
utilities conveniently under Windows and are free.
- head / tail
-
Takes first or last n lines of a file.
- sed - Simple Editor
-
This is a command-line text replacement tool.
- awk
-
This processes lines of text as a set of fields. It's useful for reordering columns
of text. This can do simple math on columns of numbers in a text file.
- grep
-
Searches a file for substrings.
Awk is the most powerful of this group and would supplant many of the small column-reordering
programs people write.
Scripting Languages
Perl,
Python, and
Tcl/Tk scripting languages run well
under Windows. They have many modules for file conversion. Commercial and free versions of these are available from
ActiveState.
At CTC, we tend to use Perl for system administration and Python for scientific
ventures, but Perl is popular with those in bioinformatics, as well.
