Last update 19 April 2024
robert (dot) mesibov (at) gmail (dot) com
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ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3466-5038
For my scientific publications go to this page. Below is a reverse-chronological selection of articles I've published online about command line tricks (especially with AWK), shell scripting and a few favourite FOSS applications. Many of these articles appeared on Andrew Powell's site The Linux Rain, but all the recent ones (2018-05 =>) are in my BASHing data blog series.
BASHing data 2: DataMatrix codes and data content 19 April 2024
BASHing data 2: CSV to JSON to CSV, awkwardly 12 April 2024
BASHing data 2: Finding near-duplicate spelling variants 5 April 2024
BASHing data 2: Table in a PDF to a TSV, on the command line 29 March 2024
BASHing data 2: Print a character as a variable with BASH printf 22 March 2024
BASHing data 2: Mapping with gnuplot, part 5 15 March 2024
BASHing data 2: Mapping with gnuplot, part 4 8 March 2024
BASHing data 2: Counterfeit spaces: the NBSP menace 1 March 2024
BASHing data 2: Convert Microsoft serial day numbers to YYYY-MM-DD 23 February 2024
BASHing data 2: GNU datamash and months 16 February 2024
BASHing data 2: Mojibake with 2 hearts and 52 bytes 9 February 2024
BASHing data 2: Finding identifier codes with and without extra characters 2 February 2024
BASHing data: People are the best data cleaners 8 April 2022
BASHing data: Mapping with gnuplot, part 3 6 April 2022
BASHing data: Mapping with gnuplot, part 2 30 March 2022
BASHing data: gron the JSON flattener 23 March 2022
BASHing data: How to flatten ("unpivot") a data table 16 March 2022
BASHing data: Search for (exact) strings; report line, column and context 9 March 2022
BASHing data: Auto-incrementing version letters 2 March 2022
BASHing data: Online shopping and a one2many tweak 23 February 2022
BASHing data: DNA-style frameshift cryptography 16 February 2022
BASHing data: Apple + Microsoft = character confusion 9 February 2022
BASHing data: How to use patsplit (GNU AWK) 2 February 2022
BASHing data: Scripting a temperature notifier 26 January 2022
BASHing data: A dog-cat-horse-turtle problem 19 January 2022
BASHing data: Tidy tables for data processing 12 January 2022
BASHing data: Are you 10000 days old yet? 5 January 2022
BASHing data: Building an ODT on the command line 29 December 2021
BASHing data: Making a transect into a point and circle 22 December 2021
BASHing data: Detecting truncations: another sometimes successful method 15 December 2021
BASHing data: Gremlin detection bigly improved and a NUL problem avoided 8 December 2021
BASHing data: Combinations from 2 lists: speed trials 1 December 2021
BASHing data: How to watermark a UTF-8 plain text file 24 November 2021
BASHing data: What's wrong with my footprintWKT? 17 November 2021
BASHing data: A quick cross-file comparison with AWK 10 November 2021
BASHing data: On visual contrast and QR codes 3 November 2021
BASHing data: Duplicate records differing only in unique identifiers 27 October 2021
BASHing data: Some regex tests with grep, sed and AWK 20 October 2021
BASHing data: TSV to CSV on the CLI (if you really have to) 13 October 2021
BASHing data: How to do replacements based on multiple field values 6 October 2021
BASHing data: How to find mixed Latin+Cyrillic words 29 September 2021
BASHing data: An AWK histogram with scaling 22 September 2021
BASHing data: Show Unicode code points for UTF-8 characters 15 September 2021
BASHing data: Put an editable command at the next prompt 8 September 2021
BASHing data: Yet another gremlin: the zero-width space 1 September 2021
BASHing data: zbarimg and blurry QR codes 25 August 2021
BASHing data: CSV viewers for CSV haters 18 August 2021
BASHing data: Two data formatting tweaks 11 August 2021
BASHing data: Visualising data as a PGM image 4 August 2021
BASHing data: Revisiting a command-line translator 28 July 2021
BASHing data: The data worker's guide to psiphiorrhea 21 July 2021
BASHing data: What is +ACY- doing in the data? 14 July 2021
BASHing data: Reverse or shuffle a string in a particular field 7 July 2021
BASHing data: There's data missing - please explain 30 June 2021
BASHing data: "Firstname Lastname" to "Lastname, Firstname", with complications 23 June 2021
BASHing data: The curious world of check digits 16 June 2021
BASHing data: Batch triangulation on the command line 9 June 2021
BASHing data: CSV to table, table to CSV 2 June 2021
BASHing data: The little museum and its data 1 June 2021
BASHing data: The Incrementing Fill-Down Error 26 May 2021
BASHing data: Mojibake madness 19 May 2021
BASHing data: A data checker's checklist 12 May 2021
BASHing data: Building a molar mass calculator 24 March 2021
BASHing data: How to fix "one2many" data issues 17 March 2021
BASHing data: Hunting Excel date twins 9 March 2021
BASHing data: DIY primary/foreign key relationships, again 3 March 2021
BASHing data: Four kinds of data anomalies 24 February 2021
BASHing data: A sunset surprise 17 February 2021
BASHing data: Converting a list to a presence/absence table 10 February 2021
BASHing data: How to find the missing parts of a series 3 February 2021
BASHing data: ASCII score bars and a gorblimey command 27 January 2021
BASHing data: Spreadsheet annoyance no. 3: quotes have priority 20 January 2021
BASHing data: Form text and placeholders 13 January 2021
BASHing data: How to build a multi-file fields concordance 23 December 2020
BASHing data: Mojibake bonanza 16 December 2020
BASHing data: Comparing strings more clearly 9 December 2020
BASHing data: Re-format "blah,YYYYMMDD,blah" as "blah,YYYY,MM,DD,blah" 2 December 2020
BASHing data: How to stack columns 25 November 2020
BASHing data: Check the day of year, given a date 18 November 2020
BASHing data: Updating a file from a lookup table 11 November 2020
BASHing data: How to keep an eye on field numbers 4 November 2020
BASHing data: A short rant about Python, R and UNIX 28 October 2020
BASHing data: How to use flags in AWK (revisited) 21 October 2020
BASHing data: The myth of equinoctial gales 14 October 2020
BASHing data: Building a data table from a sentence 7 October 2020
BASHing data: Three kangaroos in the ocean 30 September 2020
BASHing data: Encoding detection smackdown 23 September 2020
BASHing data: Finding one-to-many entries in a data table 16 September 2020
BASHing data: Spotting spaces, and AWK's view of emptiness 9 September 2020
BASHing data: Checking DIY primary/foreign key relationships 2 September 2020
BASHing data: What's wrong with these records? 26 August 2020
BASHing data: How to do a both/neither/one/other tally 19 August 2020
BASHing data: A data table thousands of years old 12 August 2020
BASHing data: How to number copy/pasted commands 5 August 2020
BASHing data: Sharing data and metadata together 29 July 2020
BASHing data: A grizzle about captive data 22 July 2020
BASHing data: A quick repair job on a dislocated table 15 July 2020
BASHing data: Extra commas in a CSV 8 July 2020
BASHing data: How to find almost-duplicates 1 July 2020
BASHing data: Character equivalence classes 2: the nature of equivalence 24 June 2020
BASHing data: Character equivalence classes 1: search and replace 17 June 2020
BASHing data: How to bookmark directories in the shell 10 June 2020
BASHing data: Join consecutive lines if condition applies 3 June 2020
BASHing data: Printing repeats within repeats, and splitting a list into columns 27 May 2020
BASHing data: Add an issues field to a data table 20 May 2020
BASHing data: How to move selected lines within a file 13 May 2020
BASHing data: Spellchecking scientific names on the command line 6 May 2020
BASHing data: Dealing with an all-CAPS/first-CAP jumble 29 April 2020
BASHing data: Brace expansion with variables and arrays: eval to the rescue 22 April 2020
BASHing data: Checking date components across fields 15 April 2020
BASHing data: Targeted string replacements with sed and AWK 8 April 2020
BASHing data: More mojibake fun 1 April 2020
BASHing data: Second Tuesday of each month and a BASHing data century 25 March 2020
BASHing data: A curious pair of data ops 18 March 2020
BASHing data: Life tables 11 March 2020
BASHing data: Moving averages with AWK 4 March 2020
BASHing data: The easy-going syntax of AWK commands 26 February 2020
BASHing data: Changing TTY prompt, font and colors 19 February 2020
BASHing data: How to be uncertain with dates 12 February 2020
BASHing data: Data quality in iNaturalist downloads 5 February 2020
BASHing data: JSON Lines: record-style JSON 29 January 2020
BASHing data: Hunting gremlins 22 January 2020
BASHing data: Getting around a subshell problem 15 January 2020
BASHing data: Build your own character class inventories 27 December 2019
BASHing data: Msot popele can undreatnsd tihs setennce 20 December 2019
BASHing data: Emphasising text in the terminal 13 December 2019
BASHing data: Another surprising AWK trick 6 December 2019
BASHing data: Data validation on entry with YAD 29 November 2019
BASHing data: Python and shell tools 22 November 2019
BASHing data: Embedded newlines without a clue 15 November 2019
BASHing data: Topping and tailing, and the slowness of GNU sort 8 November 2019
BASHing data: Introducing the replo 1 November 2019
BASHing data: Steady as she goes, in Darwin 25 October 2019
BASHing data: An unexpected character replacement 18 October 2019
BASHing data: VisiData: a table explorer for the terminal 11 October 2019
BASHing data: How to guess the field separator in a table 4 October 2019
BASHing data: A command-line "Countdown" (UK) companion 27 September 2019
BASHing data: A muggle's guide to AWK arrays: 4 20 September 2019
BASHing data: Add leading zeroes that aren't really leading 13 September 2019
BASHing data: Getting data from an Enphase Envoy S 6 September 2019
BASHing data: A shell script for building a new table with reordered fields 30 August 2019
BASHing data: A muggle's guide to AWK arrays: 3 23 August 2019
BASHing data: Long, narrow tables vs short, wide ones 16 August 2019
BASHing data: The lat/lon floating point delusion 9 August 2019
BASHing data: A bulk replacement GUI with YAD 2 August 2019
BASHing data: Renumber a list after inserting a line 26 July 2019
BASHing data: Finding malformed markup 19 July 2019
BASHing data: A muggle's guide to AWK arrays: 2 12 July 2019
BASHing data: Return of the mojibake detective 5 July 2019
BASHing data: Leading and trailing whitespace 28 June 2019
BASHing data: Plotting data in the terminal with gnuplot 21 June 2019
BASHing data: Working around the BASH brace expansion rule 14 June 2019
BASHing data: A muggle's guide to AWK arrays: 1 07 June 2019
BASHing data: Growing the Cookbook's "broken" function 31 May 2019
BASHing data: Transpose, pivot and bin with GNU Datamash 1.4 24 May 2019
BASHing data: The magic of BASH string expansion 19 May 2019
BASHing data: How to delete, insert and replace whole lines 12 May 2019
BASHing data: How to delete, insert and replace whole fields 5 May 2019
BASHing data: Two ugly CSVs 28 April 2019
BASHing data: Spreadsheet annoyance no. 2 21 April 2019
BASHing data: Making pictures with data 14 April 2019
BASHing data: Quotes as characters 7 April 2019
BASHing data: Dog and cat data 31 March 2019
BASHing data: How to choose special characters, revisited 24 March 2019
BASHing data: The trouble with Windows CRLF 17 March 2019
BASHing data: Data with bulges 10 March 2019
BASHing data: Two special data validations 3 March 2019
BASHing data: Data from dingbats: copying down 24 February 2019
BASHing data: Fancy numbering of records 17 February 2019
BASHing data: Getting data out of Excel safely 10 February 2019
BASHing data: Comparing fields across two tables 3 February 2019
BASHing data: Reformatting a list, cleverly 27 January 2019
BASHing data: Parsing scientific names 20 January 2019
BASHing data: Horizontal sorting within a field 13 January 2019
BASHing data: Drugs on the command line 6 January 2019
BASHing data: Changing the month format: a fairly general solution 30 December 2018
BASHing data: Has the rainfall pattern in my hometown changed? 23 December 2018
BASHing data: How many fruits in 5 apples, 3 oranges, 1 pear and 17 lemons? 16 December 2018
BASHing data: Putting information into a table from the table's filename 13 December 2018
BASHing data: Finding changepoints in a list, revisited 6 December 2018
BASHing data: Unwrap your fasta 1 December 2018
BASHing data: Avoiding senior moments with command-line functions 13 November 2018
BASHing data: How to find distances between lat/lons for geochecking 7 November 2018
BASHing data: Mapping with gnuplot 31 October 2018
BASHing data: Repair job: separate the tandem repeats 26 October 2018
BASHing data: Bird watching with AWK and grep 24 October 2018
BASHing data: How to enter nothing in a database 18 October 2018
BASHing data: How to validate ISO 8601 dates without regex 5 October 2018
BASHing data: Fightin' fields 30 September 2018
BASHing data: Fuzzy matching in practice 23 September 2018
BASHing data: Data on clay 20 September 2018
BASHing data: iconv and illegal input sequences 13 September 2018
BASHing data: Displaying data from table fragments 6 September 2018
BASHing data: SCI and 62;c62;c62;c... 25 August 2018
BASHing data: A record pager built with YAD 18 August 2018
BASHing data: 48 sea levels and a trope for your terminal 11 August 2018
BASHing data: Mojibake detective work 6 August 2018
BASHing data: Pseudo-blank ("empty") records and fields 4 August 2018
BASHing data: GUI ways to view and edit big text files 31 July 2018
BASHing data: Question marks that aren't really question marks 27 July 2018
BASHing data: Time series ops 23 July 2018
BASHing data: Curse of the CSV monster 18 July 2018
BASHing data: Partial duplicates 14 July 2018
BASHing data: Fun with BOM data 11 July 2018
BASHing data: Truncated data items 4 July 2018
BASHing data: Too many lat/lon digits 30 June 2018
BASHing data: Embedded newlines 23 June 2018
BASHing data: Combo characters 9 June 2018
BASHing data: Pivoting airlines 3 June 2018
BASHing data: A surprising AWK trick 27 May 2018
BASHing data: Compare parts of strings 22 May 2018
BASHing data: YAD repeat and edit 21 May 2018
Liferea hack: add links to ABC (Australia) news items 21 February 2018
How to deal with NBSPs in a terminal 2 February 2018
BASH drivers, start your engines 11 January 2018
A handy script for translations 1 January 2018
When will this script finish doing its job? 1 December 2017
A simpler track-changes script 13 November 2017
File manager: open a terminal, but not here 1 November 2017
Shifty dates in Microsoft Excel 3 October 2017
It rains pretty regularly, in the shell 14 September 2017
Tweaking uniq -c 28 August 2017
Quick - what time is it in Singapore? 1 August 2017
A script to find empty fields in a table 16 July 2017
Debian 9 on a Dell OptiPlex 9020 Micro 5 July 2017
How to tidy copied PDF text with a CoPa script 30 June 2017
Sorting numbers inside text strings 15 June 2017
Presentations in a browser 29 May 2017
AWK and a rainfall time series - Part 2 16 May 2017
AWK and a rainfall time series - Part 1 15 May 2017
Xfe file manager: an independent marvel 3 May 2017
BASH a block of bytes 24 April 2017
How to build and edit LibreOffice dictionaries 13 April 2017
The buttons of YAD 2 April 2017
grep vs AWK vs Ruby, and a uniq disappointment 26 March 2017
Scripting an arithmeticker 12 March 2017
Tips for tpp and patat 22 February 2017
Scottish Country Dancing stats 1 February 2017
A script to log what my GPS tells me 17 January 2017
Eek! My rounding is biased! 7 December 2016
Scripting a DNA sequence viewer 8 November 2016
Hunting gremlin characters 21 October 2016
Teach your grandmother to write scripts 14 September 2016
Finding unmatched braces (brackets) 13 August 2016
How to use flags in AWK 16 July 2016
Proofreading for illusions with grep and AWK 18 June 2016
Transposing rows and columns: 3 methods 13 May 2016
I think I like backreferences (sometimes) 1 December 2015
Keeping emails as text files: 2 scripts 28 October 2015
How to interleave, alternate and collapse lines of text on the command line 6 October 2015
The joys of ISOdates 17 September 2015
Scripting a fancy chooser for recently used files 17 August 2015
Gnumeric: a filter-and-export script 28 July 2015
How to insert code snippets on the command line without executing them 12 July 2015
How to read a file N lines at a time in BASH: 3 methods 29 June 2015
Split a table and number the pieces: two methods 28 May 2015
Some baby name problems 1 May 2015
A "Track Changes" script for data cleaning 26 March 2015
How to garble 20 February 2015
DMS to DD to KML with AWK and sed 6 February 2015
Grouping things with AWK 22 January 2015
Building sequences of numbers on the command line 13 January 2015
Building a desktop Wikipedia checker 24 November 2014
Software is not data 7 November 2014
How to repeat a script, or not 21 October 2014
On dates and stuffed non-dates 6 October 2014
The header line: how to add, delete and ignore it 21 September 2014
Joining tables on the command line 2 September 2014
Splitting a file elegantly 29 August 2014
Tips on getting (and suggesting, and editing) user input 1 August 2014
How to get nowhere in particular [generating a random lat/lon] 1 August 2014
Top 10! fun on the command line 21 July 2014
ODT to TXT, but keep the line numbering 30 June 2014
Scripting a 4-color multiple grepper 20 June 2014
Tips on tables 4 June 2014
A pivot table in AWK 23 May 2014
Why I (sometimes) love regular expressions 5 May 2014
Scripting a 'Find-and-Replace' for big text files 23 April 2014
Multiple-item data entry with YAD 7 April 2014
Scripting an OCR text archiver for Trove 23 March 2014
How to kill blank lines elegantly 16 March 2014
Building a gazetteer table from KML files 10 March 2014
Scripting a log for a single application 4 March 2014
Scripting a super-fast points plotter for Google Earth 23 February 2014
Scripting a character chooser with dzen2 13 February 2014
Finding changes in a sorted list: a trick 22 June 2013
A very tiny GIS 5 March 2013
CoPa: 2 scripts for LibreOffice Calc and 1 for the kid in you 29 January 2013
CoPa scripting: change text between copy and paste 21 December 2012
Build a scientific names dictionary for LibreOffice 17 September 2012
Color picking made simple 5 September 2012
Compare two images easily with Geeqie 31 July 2012
Checking a website for incorrect links 25 June 2012
A spreadsheet jukebox 13 June 2012
Basics of KML 21 May 2012
Measures on the command line 2 April 2012
The F4 trick in Gnumeric 23 March 2012
Find time zones with the command line 20 February 2012