i have been trying to figure what PERL AWK, SED are for a long time. i tried typing man perl man sed but it doesan't give me any help. Are they text editors? or are they shells? any help would be appreciated thanks
All three can be used to take some text as input, process (transform) it in some ways and return it as output (which can be written to file or pipe to another program for further processing). I usually like to describe them as "text processors".
Perl is a lot more than just a text processor like the other two. It is a general purpose programming language with which you can write programs to do a wide variety of tasks. There are many third-party Perl libraries (modules) that gives you many convenient functionalities.
For awk and sed man page, search the internet...and add the OS you are using since there are different types and one may not be exactly the same as the other.
(example: man awk
