[solsenNet]

Unix Power Tools is a great reference for data analysis.

The author does not mention the chapter on: "You Can't Quite Call this Editing" which I used extensively for some pretty involved flat file data analysis.

covers the great tools:

cut

tr

sort

uniq

also:

piping to grep and grep -v (invert match)

I also came across this great line in the sort man page for allocating in-memory usage SIZE for the sorting data:

SIZE may be followed by the following multiplicative suffixes: % 1% of memory, b 1, K 1024 (default), and so on for M, G, T, P, E, Z, Y.

...that says about all you need to know about unix ;)