These tools are used to convert XML and HTML to and from a line-oriented format more amenable to processing by classic Unix pipeline processing tools, like grep , sed , awk , cut , shell scripts, and so forth.
Documentation is available, and examples are illustrative.
I'm using version 1.8.6. Other versions might or might not work. Make sure xml-config is on your path. Fetch and unpack the source tarball for my tools from this repository . Look for a file named xml2- version .tar.gz .