Now we embark on a whirlwind tour of the standard Linux text processing commands. Because we're covering a lot of material in this tutorial, we don't have the space to provide examples for every command. Instead, we encourage you to read each command's man page (by typing man echo, for example) and learn how each command and its options work by spending some time playing with each one. As a rule, these commands print the results of any text processing to the terminal rather than modifying any specified files.

After we take our whirlwind tour of the standard Linux text processing commands, we'll take a closer look at output and input redirection. So yes, there is light at the end of the tunnel. :)

echo

echo prints its arguments to the terminal. Use the -e option if you want to embed backslash escape sequences; for example echo -e "foo\nfoo" will print foo, then a newline, and then foo again. Use the -n option to tell echo to omit the trailing newline that is appended to the output by default.