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Use this nifty Unix tool to process text on Linux Jim Hall Thu, 07/28/2022 - 03:00 1 reader likes this 1 reader likes this

Unix has always excelled at processing text, and Linux is no different. And the tools to work with and transform text files still exist on all Linux systems.

Like other computer systems, early Unix printed on paper, using a typewriter-style printing device. These printers provided limited formatting options, but with clever application of Unix tools, you could prepare professional-looking documents.

One such tool was the pr tool, to prepare text documents for printing. Let's explore how to use standard Unix tools, such as the pr processor and the fmt text formatter, to prepare text files for printing on a typewriter-style printer.

[ Read also: How I use the Linux fmt command to format text ]

Printing a plain text file

Let's say we wanted to print the MIT license, stored in a file called mit.txt. This file is already formatted for optimal screen display; lines are almost 80 columns wide, which fits well on a standard terminal.

$ cat mit.txt Copyright (c) Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. Image by:

(Jim Hall, CC BY-SA 40)

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Printer paper is also 80 columns wide, at least on the classic printers. So we can also print the file to our printer using a command like lpr. But that's not a very interesting way to print the file, and it won't be very nice to read. For example, the document will start on the first line of the printed page, and immediately on the left edge of the paper.

We can make the document easier to read by using the pr command to add a top margin. By default, pr includes the date and time, the name of the file, and the page number in the top header. For example, the top of our file might look like this:

$ pr mit.txt | head 2022-06-24 18:27 mit.txt Page 1 Copyright (c) Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights

In this example, I've used the head command to look at just the first ten lines of the pr output. The pr command also adds extra blank lines at the bottom of the page, to provide a bottom margin. The old-style typewriter printers used 66 lines per page, so the pr output assumes that too. But this file prints on one page, so I don't need to show the bottom of the file; it's just some blank lines.

Adding a left and right margin

Adding the top margin makes the document easier to read, but we can do better by adding space on the left and right of the printed page. This effectively adds a left and right margin to our document.

The first step is to use the fmt command to reformat the text file to a different width. Using fmt -w 70 reformats the text file to use lines that are 70 columns wide. We can add some blank space on the left of the document to create a left margin. Using pr -o 5 adds 5 spaces to the start of each line of the output. With the narrower text, we'll also have about 5 spaces in the right margin.

$ fmt -w 70 mit.txt | pr -o 5 | head 2022-06-24 18:35 Page 1 Copyright (c) Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including

This is how Unix users printed plain text files. You can use the same set of commands to print text files on a modern laser printer, but your printer may expect a page feed command instead of using blank lines. To do that, add the -f option to the pr command, like this:

$ fmt -w 70 mit.txt | pr -f -o 5 | lpr

I'll omit the -f in the rest of this article, but remember to add -f to the pr command if you want to print documents to a modern laser printer.

Changing the header

You may notice that when we redirect the output of fmt to the pr command, the pr output no longer shows the name of the file. That's because when we chain several commands together like this, the pr command doesn't know the filename, so it's left blank. We can add the filename to the header by using the -h option:

$ fmt -w 70 mit.txt | pr -h 'mit.txt' -o 5 | head 2022-06-24 18:45 mit.txt Page 1 Copyright (c) Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including

You can make other changes to the header, such as the -D option to change the date and time format, or replace it with new text.

$ fmt -w 70 mit.txt | pr -D '6/24/2022' -h 'mit.txt' -o 5 | head -30 6/24/2022 mit.txt Page 1 Copyright (c) Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.Printing two columns

What if you wanted to make a text document look really fancy on the printed page? Certain documents such as technical articles might need to be printed in a two-column layout. The pr command can print text in multiple columns. For example, -2 prints in two columns and -3 will print in three columns.

However, be careful when printing text in multiple columns. If the lines are too long, pr may simply overlap one column with another, effectively losing text in the output. But we can leverage the fmt command to reformat the text to a narrower width, suitable for printing in two column format.

Let's do the math: If the printed page is 80 columns wide, and we've left 5 spaces on the left and right as page margins, that leaves 70 columns for our text. Using fmt -w 35 would cut the text neatly in half for two columns, but we may not leave much space between the columns. Instead, let's use fmt -w 33 to reformat the text width to 33 before sending the output to the pr command:

$ fmt -w 33 mit.txt | pr -2 -D '6/24/2022' -h 'mit.txt' -o 5 | head -30 6/24/2022 mit.txt Page 1 Copyright (c) substantial portions of the Software. Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED obtaining a copy of this "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF software and associated ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, documentation files (the INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE "Software"), to deal in the WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, Software without restriction, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE including without limitation the AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO rights to use, copy, modify, EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR merge, publish, distribute, COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE sublicense, and/or sell copies FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER of the Software, and to permit LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION persons to whom the Software is OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, furnished to do so, subject to ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN the following conditions: CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN The above copyright notice and THE SOFTWARE. this permission notice shall $

Unix is a great platform for processing text. While we use other tools today, including HTML in web browsers and PDF for printable content, it's nice to know how to use the existing Unix tools to create professional plain text documents.

The pr tool prepares text documents for printing.

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In the Open Source Software Security Mobilization Plan released this past May, the very first stream – of the 10 recommended – is to “Deliver baseline secure software development education and certification to all.”

As the plan states, it is rare to find a software developer who receives formal training in writing software securely. The plan advocates that a modest amount of training – from 10 to ideally 40-50 hours – could make a significant difference in developer contributions to more secure software from the beginning of the software development life cycle. The Linux Foundation now offers a free course, Developing Secure Software, which is 15 hours of training across 3 modules (security principles, implementation considerations & software verification).

The plan proposes, “bringing together a small team to iterate and improve such training materials so they can be considered industry standard, and then driving demand for those courses and certifications through partnerships with educational institutions of all kinds, coding academies and accelerators, and major employers to both train their own employees and require certification for job applicants.”

Also in the plan is Stream 5 to, “Establish the OpenSSF Open Source Security Incident Response Team, security experts who can step in to assist open source projects during critical times when responding to a vulnerability.” They are a small team of professional software developers, vetted for security and trained on the specifics of language and frameworks being used by that OSS project. 30-40 experts would be available to go out in teams of 2-3 for any given crisis.

Christopher “CRob” Robinson is instrumental to the concepts behind, and the implementation of, both of these recommendations. He is the Director of Security Communications at Intel Product Assurance and also serves on the OpenSSF Technical Advisory Committee. At Open Source Summit North America, he sat down with TechStrong TV host Alan Shimel to talk about the origin of his nickname and, more importantly, software security education and the Open Source Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) – streams 1 and 5 in the Plan.  Here are some key takeaways:

• I’ve been with the OpenSSF for over two years, almost from the beginning. And currently I am the working group lead for the Developer Best Practices Working Group and the Vulnerability Disclosures Working Group. I sit on the Technical Advisory Committee. We help kind of shape, steer the strategy for the Foundation. I’m on the Public Policy and Government Affairs Committee. And I’m just now the owner of two brand new SIGs, special interest groups, underneath the working group. So I’m in charge of the Education SIG and the Open Source Cert SIG. We’re going to create a PSIRT for open source.
• The idea is to try to find a collection of experts from around the industry that understand how to do incident response and also understand how to get things fixed within open source communities. . . I think, ultimately, it’s going to be kind of a mentorship program for upstream communities to teach them how to do incident response. We know and help them work with security researchers and reporters and also help make sure that they’ve got tools and processes in place so they can be successful.
• A lot of the conference this week is talking about how we need to get more training and certification and education into the hands of developers. We’ve created another kind of Tiger team, and  we’re gonna be focusing on this. And my friend, Dr. David Wheeler, he had a big announcement where we have existing body of material, the secure coding fundamentals class, and he was able to transform that into SCORM. So now anybody who has a SCORM learning management system has the ability to leverage this free developer secure software training on their internal learning management systems.
• We have a lot of different learners. We have brand new students, we have people in the middle of their careers, people are making career changes. We have to kind of serve all these different constituents.

Of course, he had a lot more to say. You can watch the full interview, including how CRob got his nickname, and read the transcript below.

Transcript

Alan Shimel 00:06
Hey, everyone back here live in Austin at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit. You know, we’ve had a very security-heavy lineup this past week. And for good reason, security is top of mind to everyone. The OpenSSF. Of course, Monday was OpenSSF day, but it’s more than that. More than Monday, we really talked a lot about software supply chains and SBOMs and just securing open source software. My next guest is CGrove or CRbn? No, no, you know, I had CRob in my mind, and that’s what messed me up. Let’s go back to Crob. Excuse me. Now check this out a little thing myself. So Crob was actually the emcee of OpenSSF day on Monday.

CRob 01:01
I had an amazing hat. You did. And you didn’t wear it here. I came from outside with tacos, and it was all sweaty.

Alan Shimel 01:08
We just have two bald guys here. Anyway,

CRob 01:14
safety in numbers.

Alan Shimel 01:15
Well, yeah, that’s true. It’s true. Wear the hat next time. But anyway, first of all, welcome, man. Thank you.

CRob 01:21
It’s wonderful to be here. I’m excited to have this little chat.

Alan Shimel 01:24
We are excited to have you on here. So before we jump into Monday, and OpenSSF day, in that whole thing, you’re with Intel, full disclosure, what do you do in your day job.

CRob 01:36
So my day job, I am the Director of Security Communications. So primarily our function is as incidents happen, so there’s a new vulnerability discovered, or researchers find some report on our portfolio, I help kind of evaluate that and kind of determine how we’re going to communicate it.

Alan Shimel 01:56
Love it, and your role within OpenSSF?

CRob 02:01
So I’ve been with the OpenSSF for over two years, almost from the beginning. And currently I am the working group lead for the developer best practices working group and the vulnerability disclosures working group. I sit on the technical advisory committee, so we help kind of shape, steer the strategy for the foundation. I’m on the Public Policy and Government Affairs Committee. And I’m just now the owner of two brand new SIGs, special interest groups underneath the working group. So I’m in charge of the education SIG, and the open source cert SIG. So we’re going to create a PSIRT for open source.

Alan Shimel 02:38
That’s beautiful man. That is really and let’s talk about that SIRT. Yeah, it’ll be through Linux Foundation.

Unknown Speaker 02:47
Yeah, we are still. So back in May the foundation and some contributors created the mobilization plan. I’m sure people have talked about it this week. 10 point plan addressing trying to help respond to things like the White House executive order. And it’s a plan that says these 10 different work streams we feel we can improve the security posture of open source software. And the open source SIRT was stream five. And the idea is to try to find a collection of experts from around the industry that understand how to do incident response, and also understand how to get things fixed within open source communities.

CRob 03:27
So we’re we have our first meeting for the SIG the first week of July. And we’re going to try to refine the initial plan and kind of spec it out and see how we want to react. But I think ultimately, it’s going to be kind of a mentorship program for upstream communities to teach them how to do incident response. We know and help them work with security researchers and reporters, and also help make sure that they’ve got tools and processes in place so they can be successful.

Alan Shimel 03:56
I love it. Yeah. Let’s be honest, this is a piece of work you cut out for yourself.

Unknown Speaker 04:04
Yes, one of my other groups I work with is a group called First, the Form of Incident Response and Security Teams. And I’m one of the authors of the PSIRT services framework. So I have a little help. So I understand that you got a vendor back on that, right? Yeah, we’re gonna lean into that as kind of a model to start with, and kind of see what we need to change to make it work for open source communities.

Alan Shimel 04:27
I actually love that good thing. When do you think we might see something on this? No pressure.

Unknown Speaker 04:32
No pressure? Oh, definitely. The meetings will be public. So all of that will go up into YouTube. So you’ll be able to observe kind of the progress of the group. I expect we’re going to take probably at least a month to refine the current plan and submit a proposal back to the governing board. We think this is actionable. So hopefully before the end of the year, maybe late fall, we’ll actually be able to start taking action.

Alan Shimel 04:57
All right. Love it. Love it. Gotta ask you, Where does the name come from?

Unknown Speaker 05:03
So the name comes from Novell GroupWise. So back in the day, our network was run by an HP VAX. But our email system plugged into the VAX and you were limited by the characters of your name. So my name Chris Robinson. So his first little first letter, first name, next seven of your last, so I ended up being Crobinsoe. And we hired a developer that walked in, he looked at it, and he’s like, ah, Crobinso the chromosome, right? Got shortened to Crob.

Alan Shimel 05:36
Okay, not very cool. So thank you. Not Crob. That’s right. Thank you Novell is right. That was very interesting days. Remember.

Unknown Speaker 05:45
I love that stuff. I was Novell engineer for many years.

Alan Shimel 05:49
That’s when certs really meant something certified Novell. You are? Yeah. Where are they now? See, I think the last time I was out in Utah. Now I was I think it was 2005. I was out in Utah, they would do if there was something they were working on.

Unknown Speaker 06:14
They bought SUSE. And we thought that that would be pretty amazing to kind of incorporate this Novell had some amazing tools. Absolutely. So we thought that would be really awesome than the NDS was the best. But we were hoping that through SUSE they be able to channel these tools and get broader adoption.

Alan Shimel 06:30
No, I think for whatever reason. There’s a lot of companies from back in those days, right, that we think about, indeed, Yeah. Anyway,

Unknown Speaker 06:45
My other working group. So we have more, but wait, there’s more, we have more. So the developer best practices working group is spinning off and education sake. So a lot of the conference this week is talking about how we need to get more training and certification and education into the hands of developers. So again, we’ve created another kind of Tiger team, are we’re gonna be focusing on this. And my friend, Dr. David Wheeler, David A. Wheeler, he had a big announcement where we have existing body of material, the secure coding fundamentals class, and he was able to transform that into SCORM. So now that anybody who has a SCORM learning management system has the ability to leverage this free developer secure software training, really, yes.

Alan Shimel 07:35
And that’s the SCORM. system. If you have SCORM, you can leverage this.

Unknown Speaker 07:39
free, there’s some rules behind it. But yeah, absolutely. It’s plugged in, we’re looking to get that donated to higher education, historically black colleges and universities (HBCU), trade schools like DeVry, wherever

Alan Shimel 07:52
Get it into people’s hands. That’s the thing to do. So that get that kind of stuff gets me really excited. I’ll be honest with you, you know, all too often, we’re good in the tech industry for forming a foundation and, and a SIG and an advisory board. But rubber meets the road, when you can teach people coming up. Right, so they come in with the right habits, because you know, it’s harder to teach the old dogs, the new tricks, right.

CRob 08:23
I can’t take the class. I know the brains full.

Alan Shimel 08:26
Yeah, no, I hear you. But no, but not only that, look, if you’ve been developing software for 25 years, and I’m gonna come and tell you, Well, what you doing is wrong. And I need you to start doing it this way. Now, I’m gonna make some progress. Because no one wants to say I know everything. And I’m not changing. People don’t just say that. But it’s just almost subconsciously, it’s a lot harder.

Unknown Speaker 08:51
It definitely is. And that’s kind of informing our approach. So we have a traditional, about 20 hours worth of traditional class material. So we’re looking at how we can transform that material into things like webinars and podcasts, and maybe a boot camp. So maybe next year, at the Open Source Summit, we might be able to offer a training class where you walk in, take the class, and walk out with a certification.

CRob 09:17
And then thinking about, you know, we have a lot of different learners. We have, you know, brand new students, we have people in the middle of their careers, people are making career changes. So we have to kind of serve all these different constituents. And that’s absolutely true. And that is one of the problems. Kind of the user journeys we’re trying to fulfill is this. I’m an existing developer, how do I gain new skills or refine what I have?

Alan Shimel 09:40
Let me ask you a question. So, I come from the security side of that. Nothing the matter with putting the emphasis on developers developing more secure software. But shouldn’t we also be developing for security people to better secure open source software.

CRob 10:02
And the foundation itself does have many, it’s multipronged. And so to help like a practitioner, we have things like our scorecard and all stars. And then we have a project criticality score. And actually, we just I, there was a great session just a couple hours ago, by one of my peers, Jacque Chester, and it was kind of a, if you’re a risk guy, it was kind of based off of Open Fair, which is a risk management methodology, kind of explaining how we can evaluate open source projects, share that information with downstream consumers and risk management teams or procurement teams, and kind of give them a quantitative assessment of this is what risks you could incur by these projects.

CRob 10:44
So if you have two projects that do the same thing, one might have a higher or lower score will provide you the data that you could make your own assessment off of that and make your own judgment. So that the foundation is also looking at just many different avenues to get this out there, focused on practitioners and developers, and hopefully by this kind of hydraulic approach, it will be successful. It’ll stick.

Alan Shimel 11:07
you know what you just put as much stuff on the wall and whatever sticks sticks man up. So anyway, hey Crob. Right. I got it right. Yep. All right. Thank you for stopping by. So thank you for all you do, right. I mean, it’s a community thing. These are not paid type of gigs, right. Sure. Yeah. No, and I thank you for your for your time and efforts on that.

CRob 11:30
Thank you very much. All right.

Alan Shimel 11:31
Hey, keep up the great work. We’re gonna take a break. I think we’ve got another interview coming up in a moment. And we’re here live in Austin.

The post CRob on Software Security Education and SIRTs appeared first on Linux Foundation.

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