UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

i often hear the word parse the files, parse it etc.

what does parsing mean in such contexts.does it mean breaking the files into smaller chunnks

m-w.com if you dont know a word look it up.

2 : to examine in a minute way : analyze critically <parses appellate court opinions>
intransitive senses

This is a computer science term that refers to the step of analyzing a file conforms to a set of syntax rules defined.

Before parsing the file to be processed it is usually broken down into tokens to ease processing. This may be described as a separate process called lexical analysis, but some literature prefers to regard it as part of the parsing process.

For computer science term definitions, why not check out Wikipedia? For parsing, this is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parse