In the last installment, we examined how to compose and check your writing using the Linux tools txt2tags and aspell. Let’s assume that you’ve used these tools now — used them quite a lot. You now have several directories and sub-directories filled with dozens of text files. How to organize all of this text?

Don’t worry, Linux has you covered.

Unix users have become very adept at managing files in plain text format that might be stored all over a computer (including extremely large server systems). Historically, unlike systems such as Windows that often store system configuration data in proprietary (read: bizarre, and all-but-incomprehensible to even veteran users) format, most Unix configuration files are kept as plain text. So, in order for Unix admins to find these configurations over an entire system, many utilities to search text were created.

Linux includes these, and you can use them not only to find and manage system configs, but anything stored in plain text (such as HTML files). The Linux utility for this is called grep. Please don’t