In a previous post I went through the process of writing a shell script for optical character recognition from the terminal or console. While the post was educational enough in that one had to learn bash scripting in the process, I have to admit that it was not optimal especially for a production environment. It only served to demonstrate the Unix philosophy: that complex operations are done through small utilities chained together, and this is the soul of being productive on a Linux machine.

Text patterns are some of the fascinating and illuminating data that one comes across: one’s ability to decode them makes it possible to find whatever they are looking for. In this post, though, I am going to show the difference between globing and regex. The reason why we often mix these two has to do with the same set of characters they use, and sometimes with differing meanings. Text patterns are known as templates.

If ever there is a tool that any system administrator or programmer cherishes the most, it is their text editor. This is because among the many other resources, this is the only one that he or she can wield most to expres himself or herself unreservedly. But how does one deal with console editors? This is the answer this post seeks to answer.

The bane of anyone doing some text-processing when he or she is blind is coming across inaccessible content. This post is going to look at how to work with digitised images and scanned PDF from the terminal. Along the way, we will develop a rudimentary program to process PDF files into plain text.

Welcome to 2021, and a new outlook for this site! There is no doubt that the past year had been a bleak one, when we lost our loved ones to the new form of a flu virus, now known as the Covid-19. When the world transformed itself into a masked world, as it became fashionable to put on a mask in the public; When business and all educational activities grounded to a virtual halt as a consequence of humankind’s failure to come to terms with what was taking place.