40 Unix Commands | Examples | Demo Version

The Berkeley Utilities (currently Version 2.0) are a set of

40 unix commands ported to DOS:

awk:	string processing language
basename:	extract base part from pathname of a file or directory
cal:	display the calendar for a year or a month
cat:	concatenate files
cb:	C beautifier
cmp:	binary file comparison
comm:	look for common lines in 2 files
cp:	copy files and directories
cut:	cut out columns or fields from files
df:	statistics on disk usage
diff:	compare files and directories
dtree:	display tree structure of directory
du:	display space each directory takes
ech:	echo arguments
ed:	line editor
expand:	expands tabs into blanks
find:	find files with certain properties and execute commands on each
grep:	search for patterns in files
head:	display the beginning of one or several files
join:	relational join of two files
ls:	list files and directories
make:	update files
more:	text files browser
mv:	move files and directories
od:	octal (or hexadecimal) dump
paste:	merge files as columns of a single file
rederr:	redirect error output of commands
rm:	remove files and directories
sed:	stream editor
sort:	sort files
split:	split a file into smaller pieces
tail:	display the end of a file
tee:	pipe connection and derivation
touch:	update file timestamp
tr:	translate standard in to standard out
unexpand:	compress to tabs runs of blanks and tabs
uniq:	weed out or find duplicate lines in a sorted file
wc:	count words and lines
which:	find which version of a program is active
xstr:	extract character strings from C programs

The Berkeley Utilities follow rigorously the unix System V syntax and include all the options found on any unix system plus a few carefully chosen ones. They sell for $ 200.

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Examples of situations you might face:

You wonder if all the "doc" files with a name starting with a letter between a and f and located below the current directory would fit on your somewhat filled diskette in the A: drive, so you just type

ls .//[a-f]*.doc -Ua

The answer is yes, they will just fit because 74.18 percent is less than 79.55 percent.
You want to create a file called new with the first 200 lines, the last 40 lines, the first 7 columns of file abc.dat, so you just type:
head -200 abc.dat > new tail -40 abc.dat > new cut -c 1-7 abc.dat > new
You want to take all the ``C'' files on your hard disk which are less than seven days old and pkzip them into your backup.zip file:
find . -name *.c -mtime -7 -exec pkzip -a backup {} ;

You want to delete your windows subdirectory or all the files in the current directory with a filename ending with the letter a
(please don't try DOS's "DEL *a.*"), so you type:
rm -r \windows rm *a.*
Where does the string xyz343 occur in my ``C'' code? Where does the string alarm, regardless of case, occur in my ``MSH'' files?
grep xyz343 *.c grep -i alarm *.msh

I have almost finished writing the DELTA2 manual (in LaTeX, hence in ASCII form) and I want to know how many times I have used each english word:
cat manual.tex | tr -cs A-Za-z \n | sort | uniq -c
so that I now know that ``You'' appears 48 times while ``you'' appears 201 times! This list is hardly comprehensive, it just tries to convey the flavor of this powerful toolbox.

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Demo Version:

download a demo (136,429 bytes).

Sometimes, the demos are too old: please change the date back to test them, then reset your date. Thanks.

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Last updated on September 25, 1999
Please send any comments to Jean-Claude Chetrit