A newbie's question about tools 4504

You might like "mc", the Midnight Commander aka Mouseless Commander program, which was originally inspired by (if memory serves) one of the MS-DOS versions of Norton Commander. You would fire up mc, then tag one (which you would then specify) on those files.

Some of us like plain ol' GNU "less", a big step forward from the standardusr-bin-more -- if necessary combined with "strings" -- but, again, perhaps the file viewer facility built into mc would meet your needs.

There's a lot of considerations of personal taste that go into choice of text editor (to put it mildly). For many, it depends on what you're already used to. E.g., if you're an old WordStar hack, you might like the "jstar" variant of the Joe (Joe's Own Editor) non-graphical editor. Or, if you're used to the proprietary pine MUA and its pico editor, you might really love GNU nano (likewise non-graphical).

(Me, I have a perverse fondness for Vim. No, I'm not going to try to sell you on it.)

There are a lot simple X11-based graphical editors. One that many people like is Nedit.

Go forth and script! If you want to try something different, look into Python and Ruby.

-- Cheers, Katrina's Law: Any sufficiently advanced incompetence Rick Moen is indistinguishable from malice.