loco

Commandline program to handle the longest common strings at the beginning of each line.

Background

I had the situation that I had many files where in each file each line started with the same string, but for each file that string was different. Some network paths/dirs/files. There was no way cover all files with a single regex. In my specific scenario I was able to handle it using sed, because I was the one who ran the command to create these files in the first place. But if I wouldn't have been, for example if someone would have sended me the files then it would have been an annoying task. So I checked if there is a tool that can handle common strings at beginning of lines in a file, and there was none, so I created loco to handle the longest common strings at start of line.

Building

make

Usage

loco [-vhpdis] [-r <char>] [-R <string>] [file]

You can't pass a file when text is piped into loco.

Options

-p          print longest common string
-d          print without longest common string
-i          ignore first line completely, second line becomes first line
-s          skip, do not change first non-ignored line
-r <char>   replace each character of longest common string with <char>
-R <string> replace longest common string with <string>
-v          print version info
-h          print help text

Examples

How the demo file looks like

$ cat demo.txt 
abcone
abctwo
abcthree

Print longest common string

$ loco -p demo.txt 
abc

Delete longest common string

$ loco -d demo.txt 
one
two
three

Replace each character of longest common string with _

$ loco -r _ demo.txt 
___one
___two
___three

Replace longest common string with string

$ loco -R prefix- demo.txt 
prefix-one
prefix-two
prefix-three

Replace longest common string with string but skip changing first line and read from pipe

$ fd
foo/
foo/abc
foo/def
foo/ghi

$ fd | loco -s -R '├─ '
foo/
├─ abc
├─ def
├─ ghi