The brilliant fun of working with the Unix CLI toolset is that there are millions of valid ways to solve a problem. I also thought of a “better” solution of my own that took an entirely different approach than most of the ones posted here. That’s not really the point.

What’s great about this article is that it follows the process of solving the problem step by step. I find that lots of programmers I work with struggle with CLI problem solving, which I find a little surprising. But I think it all depends on how you think about problems like this.

If you start from “how can I build a function to operate on this raw data?” or “what data structure would best express the relationship between these filenames?” then you will have a hard time. But if you think in terms of “how can I mutate this data to eliminate extraneous details?” and “what tools do I have handy that can solve problems on data like this given a bit of mungeing, and how can I accomplish that bit of mungeing?” and if you can accept taking several baby steps of small operations on every line of the full dataset rather than building and manipulating abstract logical structures, then you’re well on your way to making efficient use of this remarkable toolset to solve ad hoc problems like this one in minutes instead of hours.