The third part of the processing pipeline involves processing the data we have selected in the previous stage. Under this topic fall tools that sort the data or process sorted files to extract more complex results, two mini-languages, sed and awk, that allow us to process specific records, as well as tools specific for particular tasks.

In the following lessons we will learn how to sort data by various criteria, find differences between files, find common elements in files, evaluate expressions, transform between character sets, perform relational joins on files, convert between data formats, manipulate graph structures, and transform multimedia files.