[SOLVED] Remove numbers, spaces, line breaks & paragraphs from .txt on CLI

rokyo · 08-14-2017, 08:38 AM

Hi everybody!

I am looking for a way to strip all non-letter characters (i.e. spaces, numbers, line breaks and paragraph breaks) from a .txt file using the terminal, so that afterwards the .txt file will be just a loooooooong single line of letters. I want to keep upper and lower case, though.

Thank you in advance for any help!

rokyo

syg00 · 08-14-2017, 08:59 AM

"man tr"
Can be achieved with a single invocation.

Turbocapitalist · 08-14-2017, 08:59 AM

I would look at tr or sed for that. It is easy in either. Try tr first as it is simpler.

rokyo · 08-14-2017, 09:20 AM

Thanks, tr worked perfectly with:

Code:

tr -cd [:alpha:] < test.txt > test_processes.txt

Took maybe 2 seconds on CLI, while doing this in LibreOffice made my computer run out of RAM and crash.