Create a file bash/alx with these two lines inside: #!/bin/bash and echo "ALX" in linux
I have tried this:
touch bash/alx
touch '#!/bin/bash'
touch is a command that creates or updates the timestamp on a file.
echo foo outputs foo to stdout.
If you use output redirection, echo foo > bar puts foo into the file bar.
Combining these will give you your solution.
touch /path/t/myFileName
echo "text for file" > /path/to/myFileName
This page has some good information.
To create a file in Linux using touch,the syntax is:
touch /path/to/your/file
touch alx.txt # E.g
You can echo something in a file using (by default echo output to stdout):
echo content > file
# or
echo content >> file
The former override the file content if it already exist or create it while the latter will append your content to the file if it exists or create it too.
Thus you can use echo directly without needing to use touch to create the file before.
And as you can pass options to Linux commands, echo has -e that instructs it to interpret special chars like \n in your string. So you can send multiple lines to a file with echo -e "line1\nline2\n..." > somewhere.txt.
Related
I would like to know how to access the contents of a variety of txt files by passing arguments into shell scripts. I'll have different files and I'm expecting to execute with this command:
./script.sh FileA.txt
What should I put into my shell script so that I can access and manipulate the contents of the files?
I tried this but it outputs 0:
echo "$#"
I also tried these, but both output nothing:
for i in $1
do
echo "$i"
done
echo "$1"
To sum up the contents see this link to understand bash arguments more https://tecadmin.net/tutorial/bash-scripting/bash-command-arguments/ . Also as #Barmar said, to iterate through a list of arguments of unknown quantity use for i in "$#" .
edit
and as #Barmar said, $1 is simply the name of the argument. So echoing $1 will just echo the name.
I don't understand your question fully. Lets assume you have list of file names in a text file "FileA.txt".
And you wanted to run some commands for each file in the "FileA.txt" file.
Can you try below:
for i in `cat $1`
do
echo $i
done
I run the following code for concatenating files in a directory given as the argument for the script file in bash
for i in $*
do
cat $* > /home/christy/Documents/filetest/catted.txt
done
This produce the error
cat: /home/christy/Documents/filetest/catted.txt: input file is output file
I think there are at least 4 things wrong with your script....
Firstly, your loop will set the value of i to the name of each file in succession, so you would want to actually use i inside your loop, like this:
for i in $*
cat "$i" ....somewhere
done
Secondly, if you use the > redirection, each file will land exactly on top of the previous one, so you should really use the >> redirection will append the current file to the end of the previous one like this
for i in $*
do
cat "$i" >> ...somewhere
done
Thirdly, I think you should use double-quoted "$#" to get all your command-line arguments, rather than plain $*
for i in "$#"
...
Fourthly, you can achieve the exact effect I think you want with this simpler command:
cat "$#" > /home/christy/Documents/filetest/catted.txt
You can't cat a file back onto itself. That's what "input file is output file" means. Because catted.txt shows up in your list of arguments to cat, it is going to try to cat to itself. So, move catted.txt to somewhere other than the source directory.
My code is given below. Echo works fine. But, the moment I redirect output of echo to touch, I get an error "no such file or directory". Why ? How do i fix it ?
If I copy paste the output of only echo, then the file is created, but not with touch.
while read line
do
#touch < echo -e "$correctFilePathAndName"
echo -e "$correctFilePathAndName"
done < $file.txt
If you have file names in each line of your input file file.txt then you don't need to do any loop. You can just do:
touch $(<file.txt)
to create all the files in one single touch command.
You need to provide the file name as argument and not via standard input. You can use command substitution via $(…) or `…`:
while read line
do
touch "$(echo -e "$correctFilePathAndName")"
done < $file.txt
Ehm, lose the echo part... and use the correct variable name.
while read line; do
touch "$line"
done < $file.txt
try :
echo -e "$correctFilePathAndName" | touch
EDIT : Sorry correct piping is :
echo -e "$correctFilePathAndName" | xargs touch
The '<' redirects via stdin whereas touch needs the filename as an argument. xargs transforms stdin in an argument for touch.
I need to automate a process using a script and generate output files similar to the name of the input files but with some additions to it.
my process is a Java code. two input arguments and two output arguments.
java #process_class# abc.txt abd.txt abc.1.out abd.a.out
If i want to iterate this for the set of text files in my folder how can i do this
If you have the files a.txt, b.txt, and c.txt in the directory in which this is run, this program will output a_2.txt, b_2.txt, and c_2.txt with foo appended to each (replace the foo line with your processing commands).
for f in *.txt;
do f2=${f%.*}_2.txt;
cp $f $f2;
echo "Processing $f2 file...";
echo "foo" >> $f2; # Your processing command here
done
VAR="INPUTFILENAME"
# One solution this does not use the VAR:
touch INPUTFILENAME{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10}
# Another
for i in `seq 1 20` ; do
touch "${VAR}${i}"
done
And there are several other ways.
I had a bash file which prompted the user for some parameters and used defaults if nothing was given. The script then went on to perform some other commands with the parameters.
This worked great - no problems until most recent addition.
In an attempt to read the NAMES parameter from a txt file, I've added a while-loop to take in the names in the file, but I would still like the remaining parameters prompted for.
But once I added the while loop, the output shows the printed prompt in get_ans() and never pauses for a read, thus all the defaults are selected.
I would like to read the first parameter from a file, then all subsequent files from prompting the user.
What did I break by adding the while-loop?
cat list.txt |
while read line
do
get_ans "Name" "$line"
read NAME < $tmp_file
get_ans "Name" "$line"
read NAME < $tmp_file
done
function get_ans
{
if [ -f $tmp_file ]; then
rm $tmp_file
PROMPT=$1
DEFAULT=$2
echo -n "$PROMPT [$DEFAULT]: "
read ans
if [ -z "$ans" ]; then
ans="$DEFAULT"
fi
echo "$ans" > $tmp_file
}
(NOTE: Code is not copy&paste so please excuse typos. Actual code has function defined before the main())
You pipe data into your the while loops STDIN. So the read in get_ans is also taking data from that STDIN stream.
You can pipe data into while on a different file descriptor to avoid the issue and stop bothering with temp files:
while read -u 9 line; do
NAME=$(get_ans Name "$line")
done 9< list.txt
get_ans() {
local PROMPT=$1 DEFAULT=$2 ans
read -p "$PROMPT [$DEFAULT]: " ans
echo "${ans:-$DEFAULT}"
}
To read directly from the terminal, not from stdin (assuming you're on a *NIX machine, not a Windows machine):
while read foo</some/file; do
read bar</dev/tty
echo "got <$bar>"
done
When you pipe one command into another on the command line, like:
$ foo | bar
The shell is going to set it up so that bar's standard input comes from foo's standard output. Anything that foo sends to stdout will go directly to bar's stdin.
In your case, this means that the only thing that your script can read from is the standard output of the cat command, which will contain the contents of your file.
Instead of using a pipe on the command line, make the filename be the first parameter of your script. Then open and read from the file inside your code and read from the user as normal.