ExternData VS structured-text-tools

Is the “software program” ADAMS? If so, .tir files are flat text, ASCII files. You can open Notepad (or any text editor) and simply type it, and save with the .tir extension. It will be tedious but possible. Example of the format can be found here. You’ll have to look at the ADAMS (?) documentation to figure out the full names for all the coefficients.

This works well in scripts and logs of all the commands you need to do to reproduce the current state of the system from a scratch install. Also can be used with diff -u and patch, sed, perl, and awk oneliners and structured text tools. You can also capture most of the commands using sudo logging feature but it won't capture the here documents. But for modest size files you can use newlines in echo commands. Note that commands which use redrection should use something like ~~~~ sudo bash -c "echo 'foo' >>file.txt" ~~~~ instead of "sudo echo foo >>file.txt" or "echo foo | sudo tee -a file.txt

TFA is about how to handle csv files with awk. This might be useful in straightforward cases.

For all others I’d recommend to have a look at

https://github.com/dbohdan/structured-text-tools

which lists tools to handle structure text formats

in general, I'd pick something from https://github.com/dbohdan/structured-text-tools

Also, here is a list of structured text tools. You may find some tools there that are helpful in editing configuration files from the command line. Or you can use "diff -u" to create a patch file (you need to save the patch files along with sudo.log) to recreate. Also, use sfdisk --dump and sfdisk --backup to save partition information in a form that can be used to recreate backups.