With AOL (not-) releasing 2GB of data in text files, it is a good time to brush up or learn how to extract data quickly from text files. IBM has a new tutorial about command-line tools you can use to manipulate text files.

Although the tutorial talks about this as a Linux thing, it's not really. You can have most of the tools under Windows using the GNU utilities for Win32 collection. If you really want Linux anyway, you can run it within Windows using VMWare Player (free) and downloading an operating system image for it. I use Ubuntu and PC-BSD, but you can choose from quite a few operating systems. This will set up a full Unix environment inside Windows... cool! You'll need ample RAM and a good processor.

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