For decades experienced Unix users have employed many text
processing tools to make document editing tasks much easier.
Console utilities such as sed, awk, cut, paste, and join, though
useful in isolation, only realise their full potential when
combined together through the use of pipes. Recently Linux has
been used for more than just processing of ASCII text. The
growing popularity of various multimedia formats, in the form of
images and audio data, has spurred on the development of tools
to deal with such files. Many of these tools have graphical user
interfaces and cannot operate in absence of user interaction.
There are, however, a growing number of tools which can be
operated in batch mode with their interfaces disabled. Some
tools are even designed to be used from the command prompt or
within shell scripts. It is this class of tools that this
article will explore. Complex media manipulation functions can
often be effected by combining simple tools together using
techniques normally applied to text proce