UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Hello all- New to this forum, and relatively new to using grep at the Terminal command line to work with regular expressions. I've got a background in mathematics and some programming experience, so it's not been too difficult to learn the basics of searching through word lists for particular types of matches.

Now I've got a trickier piece of code that I don't know how to write, and I'm struggling to teach myself with the available online resources. I could greatly benefit from a few hours of in-person tutoring from an expert. Is this the appropriate place on this forum to post a call for a suitable tutor in my area?

I live in Queens, New York City. I imagine one afternoon might be enough to have my main questions answered and get me going on my own from there. Open to cash payment or to bartering for skills or artwork (I'm an artist).

Please be in touch if you are interested or know someone who might be. And of course if there is a better place on the forum to post this, I'd appreciate being directed that way.

All best-
Dominick T.

Hi dtalvacchio,

Have you tried the NY Linux Users Group? NYLUG - New York Linux Users Group (New York, NY) - Meetup
There are always very eager Linux users willing to help you in the LUG, especially if you put effort in learning.

Talking about learning. What is it that you would like to achieve? I know that you mentioned grep, but are you talking about shell programming or how to use the command line?
Maybe is not even necessary to have a "personal tutor".

Hello Aia, and thanks for the response.

I'm interested in learning the ins and outs of regular expressions for the purpose of crossword and other word puzzle writing.

Typically with crossword writing, the basic grep commands are more than sufficient for any needs that I might have.

But lately I'm developing some new types of word puzzles, and I'm trying to perform some search operations which are difficult but I believe may be possible in Unix. I suspect a Perl script could be written to do what I need, but I don't know enough about it to be sure about that either.

I started a thread some time ago that discussed the actual problem. Received some very thoughtful feedback and some code that seemed promising, but it became complicated so quickly that I couldn't follow. I realized I would have to learn a lot more just to understand the approaches and solutions that people were sending me. So I figure a few hours with a face-to-face meeting would be helpful.

Ah, I understand. Unfortunately, I live very far from NY.

I suggest you try Dale Doughertys phantastic book "sed & awk" from O'Reilly publishing. He explains regular expressions (which are the basis of both programs) in general at the beginning very good and in a very entertaining style. I am sure you will like that book, not only for learning purposes but as a future reference.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

I've got that book and agree completely. It is an excellent reference book and text book on regular expressions as well as sed and awk.

One can also mention these forums

Try, if not posting, solving the problems which occur here.
This will mostly improve your awk/sed/regex understanding, cause nothing beats practice.

Then compare your code to the one who responded before you.

It will probably be much shorter and more efficient (in the start).
Learn from it and try to 'disassemble it'.

A great part of these forums is text parsing and requests to convert data, matching strings, lines before and after and other more or less mundane tasks.