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I was trying to do these few operations/commands on a single line and assign it to a variable. I have it working about 90% of the way except for one part of it.
I was unaware you could do this, but I read that you can nest $(..) inside other $(..).... So I was trying to do that to get this working, but can't seem to get it the rest of the way.
So basically, what I want to do is:
1. Take the output of a file and assign it to a variable
2. Then pre-pend some text to the start of that output
3. Then append some text to the end of the output
4. And finally remove newlines and replace them with "\n" character...
I can do this just fine in multiple steps but I would like to try and get this working this way.
So far I have tried the following:
My 1st attempt, before reading about nested $(..):
MY_VAR=$(echo -n "<pre style=\"display:inline;\">"; cat input.txt | sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/\\n/g'; echo -n "</pre>")
This one worked 99% of the way except there was a newline being added between the cat command's output and the last echo command. I'm guessing this is from the cat command since sed removed all newlines except for that one, maybe...?
Other tries:
MY_VAR=$( $(echo -n "<pre style=\"display:inline;\">"; cat input.txt; echo -n "</pre>") | sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/\\n/g')
MY_VAR="$( echo $(echo -n "<pre style=\"display:inline;\">"; cat input.txt; echo "</pre>") | sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/\\n/g' )"
MY_VAR="$( echo "$(echo -n "<pre style=\"display:inline;\">"; cat input.txt; echo "</pre>")" | sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/\\n/g' )"
*Most these others were tried with and without the extra double-quotes surrounding the different $(..) parts...
I had a few other attempts, but they didn't have any luck either... On a few of the other attempts above, it seemed to work except sed was NOT inserting the replacement part of it. The output was correct for the most part, except instead of seeing "\n" between lines it just showed each of the lines smashed together into one line without anything to separate them...
I'm thinking there is something small I am missing here if anyone has any idea..?
*P.S. Does Bash have a name for the $(..) structure? It's hard trying to Google for that since it doesn't really search symbols...
You have no need to nest command substitutions here.
your_var='<pre style="display:inline;">'"$(<input.txt)"'</pre>'
your_var=${your_var//$'\n'/'\n'}
"$(<input.txt)" expands to the contents of input.txt, but without any trailing newline. (Command substitution always strips trailing newlines; printf '%s' "$(cat ...)" has the same effect, albeit less efficiently as it requires a subshell, whereas cat ... alone does not).
${foo//bar/baz} expands to the contents of the shell variable named foo, with all instances of bar replaced with baz.
$'\n' is bash syntax for a literal newline.
'\n' is bash syntax for a two-character string, beginning with a backslash.
Thus, tying all this together, it first generates a single string with the prefix, the contents of the file, and the suffix; then replaces literal newlines inside that combined string with '\n' two-character sequences.
Granted, this is multiple lines as implemented above -- but it's also much faster and more efficient than anything involving a command substitution.
However, if you really want a single, nested command substitution, you can do that:
your_var=$(printf '%s' '<pre style="display:inline;">' \
"$(sed '$ ! s/$/\\n/g' <input.txt | tr -d '\n')" \
'</pre>')
The printf %s combines its arguments without any delimiter between them
The sed operation adds a literal \n to the end of each line except the last
The tr -d '\n' operation removes literal newlines from the file
However, even this approach could be done more efficiently without the nesting:
printf -v your_var '%s' '<pre style="display:inline;">' \
"$(sed '$ ! s/$/\\n/g' <input.txt | tr -d '\n')" \
'</pre>')
...which has the printf assign its results directly to your_var, without any outer command substitution required (and thus saving the expense of the outer subshell).
With the help of SO I have been able to correct my sed command so I can use variables (was using ' instead of " and wasn't using g for global).
However, I am struggling to get the command to work correctly.
To give you some context, I have a file containing numerous lines of text and some line contain one or more tags. these tags are in the following format:
[#$key#] - i.e #[#] is used to indicate the presence of a key
Then I have an internal array object which stores a string value which contains each key and a corresponding value in the following format:
$key=$value
What I am trying to do is to cat my file containing the tags at the same time as using a global sed replace to swap the $key for the corresponding value within the array object.
The problem I have is that my grep/sed command is not replacing any of the text and I can't figure out why.
here is my code:
for x in "${prop[#]}"
do
key=`echo "${x}" | cut -d '=' -f 1`
value=`echo "${x}" | cut -d '=' -f 2`
# global replace on the $MY_FILE
cat $MY_FILE | sed "s|\[#${key}#\]|${value}|g" > ${TEMP_MY_FILE}
cat $TEMP_MY_FILE > $MY_FILE
done
I thought about using sed -i, but my version doesn't seem to support-i
Although [ doesn't have any special meaning in a double-quoted bash string, \[ still evaluates to [ since backslashes are processed to allow for escaping dollar signs. Try
sed "s|\\[#${key}#\\]|${value}|g"
as your sed command. The double backslash will causes a literal backslash to be sent to sed, which will use it to escape the [ to treat it literally as well.
I have a string like this:
/var/cpanel/users/joebloggs:DNS9=domain.example
I need to extract the username (joebloggs) from this string and store it in a variable.
The format of the string will always be the same with exception of joebloggs and domain.example so I am thinking the string can be split twice using cut?
The first split would split by : and we would store the first part in a variable to pass to the second split function.
The second split would split by / and store the last word (joebloggs) into a variable
I know how to do this in PHP using arrays and splits but I am a bit lost in bash.
To extract joebloggs from this string in bash using parameter expansion without any extra processes...
MYVAR="/var/cpanel/users/joebloggs:DNS9=domain.example"
NAME=${MYVAR%:*} # retain the part before the colon
NAME=${NAME##*/} # retain the part after the last slash
echo $NAME
Doesn't depend on joebloggs being at a particular depth in the path.
Summary
An overview of a few parameter expansion modes, for reference...
${MYVAR#pattern} # delete shortest match of pattern from the beginning
${MYVAR##pattern} # delete longest match of pattern from the beginning
${MYVAR%pattern} # delete shortest match of pattern from the end
${MYVAR%%pattern} # delete longest match of pattern from the end
So # means match from the beginning (think of a comment line) and % means from the end. One instance means shortest and two instances means longest.
You can get substrings based on position using numbers:
${MYVAR:3} # Remove the first three chars (leaving 4..end)
${MYVAR::3} # Return the first three characters
${MYVAR:3:5} # The next five characters after removing the first 3 (chars 4-9)
You can also replace particular strings or patterns using:
${MYVAR/search/replace}
The pattern is in the same format as file-name matching, so * (any characters) is common, often followed by a particular symbol like / or .
Examples:
Given a variable like
MYVAR="users/joebloggs/domain.example"
Remove the path leaving file name (all characters up to a slash):
echo ${MYVAR##*/}
domain.example
Remove the file name, leaving the path (delete shortest match after last /):
echo ${MYVAR%/*}
users/joebloggs
Get just the file extension (remove all before last period):
echo ${MYVAR##*.}
example
NOTE: To do two operations, you can't combine them, but have to assign to an intermediate variable. So to get the file name without path or extension:
NAME=${MYVAR##*/} # remove part before last slash
echo ${NAME%.*} # from the new var remove the part after the last period
domain
Define a function like this:
getUserName() {
echo $1 | cut -d : -f 1 | xargs basename
}
And pass the string as a parameter:
userName=$(getUserName "/var/cpanel/users/joebloggs:DNS9=domain.example")
echo $userName
What about sed? That will work in a single command:
sed 's#.*/\([^:]*\).*#\1#' <<<$string
The # are being used for regex dividers instead of / since the string has / in it.
.*/ grabs the string up to the last backslash.
\( .. \) marks a capture group. This is \([^:]*\).
The [^:] says any character _except a colon, and the * means zero or more.
.* means the rest of the line.
\1 means substitute what was found in the first (and only) capture group. This is the name.
Here's the breakdown matching the string with the regular expression:
/var/cpanel/users/ joebloggs :DNS9=domain.example joebloggs
sed 's#.*/ \([^:]*\) .* #\1 #'
Using a single Awk:
... | awk -F '[/:]' '{print $5}'
That is, using as field separator either / or :, the username is always in field 5.
To store it in a variable:
username=$(... | awk -F '[/:]' '{print $5}')
A more flexible implementation with sed that doesn't require username to be field 5:
... | sed -e s/:.*// -e s?.*/??
That is, delete everything from : and beyond, and then delete everything up until the last /. sed is probably faster too than awk, so this alternative is definitely better.
Using a single sed
echo "/var/cpanel/users/joebloggs:DNS9=domain.example" | sed 's/.*\/\(.*\):.*/\1/'
I like to chain together awk using different delimitators set with the -F argument. First, split the string on /users/ and then on :
txt="/var/cpanel/users/joebloggs:DNS9=domain.com"
echo $txt | awk -F"/users/" '{print$2}' | awk -F: '{print $1}'
$2 gives the text after the delim, $1 the text before it.
I know I'm a little late to the party and there's already good answers, but here's my method of doing something like this.
DIR="/var/cpanel/users/joebloggs:DNS9=domain.example"
echo ${DIR} | rev | cut -d'/' -f 1 | rev | cut -d':' -f1
I'm trying to convert "Hello" to 48 65 6c 6c 6f in hexadecimal as efficiently as possible using the command line.
I've tried looking at printf and google, but I can't get anywhere.
Any help greatly appreciated.
Many thanks in advance,
echo -n "Hello" | od -A n -t x1
Explanation:
The echo program will provide the string to the next command.
The -n flag tells echo to not generate a new line at the end of the "Hello".
The od program is the "octal dump" program. (We will be providing a flag to tell it to dump it in hexadecimal instead of octal.)
The -A n flag is short for --address-radix=n, with n being short for "none". Without this part, the command would output an ugly numerical address prefix on the left side. This is useful for large dumps, but for a short string it is unnecessary.
The -t x1 flag is short for --format=x1, with the x being short for "hexadecimal" and the 1 meaning 1 byte.
If you want to do this and remove the spaces you need:
echo -n "Hello" | od -A n -t x1 | sed 's/ *//g'
The first two commands in the pipeline are well explained by #TMS in his answer, as edited by #James. The last command differs from #TMS comment in that it is both correct and has been tested. The explanation is:
sed is a stream editor.
s is the substitute command.
/ opens a regular expression - any character may be used. / is
conventional, but inconvenient for processing, say, XML or path names.
/ or the alternate character you chose, closes the regular expression and
opens the substitution string.
In / */ the * matches any sequence of the previous character (in this
case, a space).
/ or the alternate character you chose, closes the substitution string.
In this case, the substitution string // is empty, i.e. the match is
deleted.
g is the option to do this substitution globally on each line instead
of just once for each line.
The quotes keep the command parser from getting confused - the whole
sequence is passed to sed as the first option, namely, a sed script.
#TMS brain child (sed 's/^ *//') only strips spaces from the beginning of each line (^ matches the beginning of the line - 'pattern space' in sed-speak).
If you additionally want to remove newlines, the easiest way is to append
| tr -d '\n'
to the command pipes. It functions as follows:
| feeds the previously processed stream to this command's standard input.
tr is the translate command.
-d specifies deleting the match characters.
Quotes list your match characters - in this case just newline (\n).
Translate only matches single characters, not sequences.
sed is uniquely retarded when dealing with newlines. This is because sed is one of the oldest unix commands - it was created before people really knew what they were doing. Pervasive legacy software keeps it from being fixed. I know this because I was born before unix was born.
The historical origin of the problem was the idea that a newline was a line separator, not part of the line. It was therefore stripped by line processing utilities and reinserted by output utilities. The trouble is, this makes assumptions about the structure of user data and imposes unnatural restrictions in many settings. sed's inability to easily remove newlines is one of the most common examples of that malformed ideology causing grief.
It is possible to remove newlines with sed - it is just that all solutions I know about make sed process the whole file at once, which chokes for very large files, defeating the purpose of a stream editor. Any solution that retains line processing, if it is possible, would be an unreadable rat's nest of multiple pipes.
If you insist on using sed try:
sed -z 's/\n//g'
-z tells sed to use nulls as line separators.
Internally, a string in C is terminated with a null. The -z option is also a result of legacy, provided as a convenience for C programmers who might like to use a temporary file filled with C-strings and uncluttered by newlines. They can then easily read and process one string at a time. Again, the early assumptions about use cases impose artificial restrictions on user data.
If you omit the g option, this command removes only the first newline. With the -z option sed interprets the entire file as one line (unless there are stray nulls embedded in the file), terminated by a null and so this also chokes on large files.
You might think
sed 's/^/\x00/' | sed -z 's/\n//' | sed 's/\x00//'
might work. The first command puts a null at the front of each line on a line by line basis, resulting in \n\x00 ending every line. The second command removes one newline from each line, now delimited by nulls - there will be only one newline by virtue of the first command. All that is left are the spurious nulls. So far so good. The broken idea here is that the pipe will feed the last command on a line by line basis, since that is how the stream was built. Actually, the last command, as written, will only remove one null since now the entire file has no newlines and is therefore one line.
Simple pipe implementation uses an intermediate temporary file and all input is processed and fed to the file. The next command may be running in another thread, concurrently reading that file, but it just sees the stream as a whole (albeit incomplete) and has no awareness of the chunk boundaries feeding the file. Even if the pipe is a memory buffer, the next command sees the stream as a whole. The defect is inextricably baked into sed.
To make this approach work, you need a g option on the last command, so again, it chokes on large files.
The bottom line is this: don't use sed to process newlines.
echo hello | hexdump -v -e '/1 "%02X "'
Playing around with this further,
A working solution is to remove the "*", it is unnecessary for both the original requirement to simply remove spaces as well if substituting an actual character is desired, as follows
echo -n "Hello" | od -A n -t x1 | sed 's/ /%/g'
%48%65%6c%6c%6f
So, I consider this as an improvement answering the original Q since the statement now does exactly what is required, not just apparently.
Combining the answers from TMS and i-always-rtfm-and-stfw, the following works under Windows using gnu-utils versions of the programs 'od', 'sed', and 'tr':
echo "Hello"| tr -d '\42' | tr -d '\n' | tr -d '\r' | od -v -A n -tx1 | sed "s/ //g"
or in a CMD file as:
#echo "%1"| tr -d '\42' | tr -d '\n' | tr -d '\r' | od -v -A n -tx1 | sed "s/ //g"
A limitation on my solution is it will remove all double quotes (").
"tr -d '\42'" removes quote marks that the Windows 'echo' will include.
"tr -d '\r'" removes the carriage return, which Windows includes as well as '\n'.
The pipe (|) character must follow immediately after the string or the Windows echo will add that space after the string.
There is no '-n' switch to the Windows echo command.
I need to edit a few text files (an output from sar) and convert them into CSV files.
I need to change every whitespace (maybe it's a tab between the numbers in the output) using sed or awk functions (an easy shell script in Linux).
Can anyone help me? Every command I used didn't change the file at all; I tried gsub.
tr ' ' ',' <input >output
Substitutes each space with a comma, if you need you can make a pass with the -s flag (squeeze repeats), that replaces each input sequence of a repeated character that is listed in SET1 (the blank space) with a single occurrence of that character.
Use of squeeze repeats used to after substitute tabs:
tr -s '\t' <input | tr '\t' ',' >output
Try something like:
sed 's/[:space:]+/,/g' orig.txt > modified.txt
The character class [:space:] will match all whitespace (spaces, tabs, etc.). If you just want to replace a single character, eg. just space, use that only.
EDIT: Actually [:space:] includes carriage return, so this may not do what you want. The following will replace tabs and spaces.
sed 's/[:blank:]+/,/g' orig.txt > modified.txt
as will
sed 's/[\t ]+/,/g' orig.txt > modified.txt
In all of this, you need to be careful that the items in your file that are separated by whitespace don't contain their own whitespace that you want to keep, eg. two words.
without looking at your input file, only a guess
awk '{$1=$1}1' OFS=","
redirect to another file and rename as needed
What about something like this :
cat texte.txt | sed -e 's/\s/,/g' > texte-new.txt
(Yes, with some useless catting and piping ; could also use < to read from the file directly, I suppose -- used cat first to output the content of the file, and only after, I added sed to my command-line)
EDIT : as #ghostdog74 pointed out in a comment, there's definitly no need for thet cat/pipe ; you can give the name of the file to sed :
sed -e 's/\s/,/g' texte.txt > texte-new.txt
If "texte.txt" is this way :
$ cat texte.txt
this is a text
in which I want to replace
spaces by commas
You'll get a "texte-new.txt" that'll look like this :
$ cat texte-new.txt
this,is,a,text
in,which,I,want,to,replace
spaces,by,commas
I wouldn't go just replacing the old file by the new one (could be done with sed -i, if I remember correctly ; and as #ghostdog74 said, this one would accept creating the backup on the fly) : keeping might be wise, as a security measure (even if it means having to rename it to something like "texte-backup.txt")
This command should work:
sed "s/\s/,/g" < infile.txt > outfile.txt
Note that you have to redirect the output to a new file. The input file is not changed in place.
sed can do this:
sed 's/[\t ]/,/g' input.file
That will send to the console,
sed -i 's/[\t ]/,/g' input.file
will edit the file in-place
Here's a Perl script which will edit the files in-place:
perl -i.bak -lpe 's/\s+/,/g' files*
Consecutive whitespace is converted to a single comma.
Each input file is moved to .bak
These command-line options are used:
-i.bak edit in-place and make .bak copies
-p loop around every line of the input file, automatically print the line
-l removes newlines before processing, and adds them back in afterwards
-e execute the perl code
If you want to replace an arbitrary sequence of blank characters (tab, space) with one comma, use the following:
sed 's/[\t ]+/,/g' input_file > output_file
or
sed -r 's/[[:blank:]]+/,/g' input_file > output_file
If some of your input lines include leading space characters which are redundant and don't need to be converted to commas, then first you need to get rid of them, and then convert the remaining blank characters to commas. For such case, use the following:
sed 's/ +//' input_file | sed 's/[\t ]+/,/g' > output_file
This worked for me.
sed -e 's/\s\+/,/g' input.txt >> output.csv