sed in bash doesn't produce the expected behavior [closed] - linux

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as I do some SDR project but also want to watch TV on my computer some time, I need a script to comment blacklist lines in a file in modprobe, when I want to use SDR, and I need to uncomment those lines when I want to watch TV.
So I worked on a script, based on my multiple reading on internet, but unfortunately it doesn't work on my machine.
I hope that you can help me fix it.
Note, individual sed commands did work (with simple quote, as in bash we need double quotes)
#!/bin/bash
# your target file
FILE="/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-dvb.conf"
# comment target
comment() {
sed -i "s/^/#/g" $FILE # comment all lines
}
# uncomment target
uncomment() {
sed -i "s/^#//g" $FILE
}
I then launch the script as: ./my_script.sh comment (or uncomment, depending on the case)

The main problem is that your script doesn't really do anything. It defines a variable and two functions, and then just exits.
If you want your script to inspect command line arguments and invoke corresponding functions, you'll have to do that manually.
For example:
case "${1:?missing command argument}" in
comment) comment;;
uncomment) uncomment;;
*) echo "$0: bad command: $1" >&2; exit 1;;
esac
Other notes:
Don't use ALL_UPPERCASE for your shell variables. Those are by convention reserved for the system and the shell itself. Better:
file="/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-dvb.conf"
As a general rule, variable expansions should be quoted ("$file") unless you really know what you're doing.
Your regexes are anchored to the beginning of the string (^). The /g flag is pointless.
In general it's better to use single quotes than double quotes. There are fewer surprises with '...' because everything is taken literally:
sed -i 's/^/#/' "$file"
sed -i 's/^#//' "$file"

OK, as I couldn't get it working in bash, I used python for that, and it does the job perfectly :)
For others who need help, here is my script:
#!/usr/bin/python
import subprocess
import sys
def comment():
subprocess.call(["sed -i 's/^/#/g' /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-dvb.conf"], shell=True)
def uncomment():
subprocess.call(["sed -i 's/^#//g' /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-dvb.conf"], shell=True)
# Print
print("Script name ", sys.argv[0])
print("Argument 1 ", sys.argv[1])
argument_1 = sys.argv[1]
if argument_1 == "comment":
print("in comment")
comment()
elif argument_1 =="uncomment":
uncomment()
else:
print("usage = python switcher.py comment")

Related

"read" command not executing in "while read line" loop [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Read user input inside a loop
(6 answers)
Closed 5 years ago.
First post here! I really need help on this one, I looked the issue on google, but can't manage to find an useful answer for me. So here's the problem.
I'm having fun coding some like of a framework in bash. Everyone can create their own module and add it to the framework. BUT. To know what arguments the script require, I created an "args.conf" file that must be in every module, that kinda looks like this:
LHOST;true;The IP the remote payload will connect to.
LPORT;true;The port the remote payload will connect to.
The first column is the argument name, the second defines if it's required or not, the third is the description. Anyway, long story short, the framework is supposed to read the args.conf file line by line to ask the user a value for every argument. Here's the piece of code:
info "Reading module $name argument list..."
while read line; do
echo $line > line.tmp
arg=`cut -d ";" -f 1 line.tmp`
requ=`cut -d ";" -f 2 line.tmp`
if [ $requ = "true" ]; then
echo "[This argument is required]"
else
echo "[This argument isn't required, leave a blank space if you don't wan't to use it]"
fi
read -p " $arg=" answer
echo $answer >> arglist.tmp
done < modules/$name/args.conf
tr '\n' ' ' < arglist.tmp > argline.tmp
argline=`cat argline.tmp`
info "Launching module $name..."
cd modules/$name
$interpreter $file $argline
cd ../..
rm arglist.tmp
rm argline.tmp
rm line.tmp
succes "Module $name execution completed."
As you can see, it's supposed to ask the user a value for every argument... But:
1) The read command seems to not be executing. It just skips it, and the argument has no value
2) Despite the fact that the args.conf file contains 3 lines, the loops seems to be executing just a single time. All I see on the screen is "[This argument is required]" just one time, and the module justs launch (and crashes because it has not the required arguments...).
Really don't know what to do, here... I hope someone here have an answer ^^'.
Thanks in advance!
(and sorry for eventual mistakes, I'm french)
Alpha.
As #that other guy pointed out in a comment, the problem is that all of the read commands in the loop are reading from the args.conf file, not the user. The way I'd handle this is by redirecting the conf file over a different file descriptor than stdin (fd #0); I like to use fd #3 for this:
while read -u3 line; do
...
done 3< modules/$name/args.conf
(Note: if your shell's read command doesn't understand the -u option, use read line <&3 instead.)
There are a number of other things in this script I'd recommend against:
Variable references without double-quotes around them, e.g. echo $line instead of echo "$line", and < modules/$name/args.conf instead of < "modules/$name/args.conf". Unquoted variable references get split into words (if they contain whitespace) and any wildcards that happen to match filenames will get replaced by a list of matching files. This can cause really weird and intermittent bugs. Unfortunately, your use of $argline depends on word splitting to separate multiple arguments; if you're using bash (not a generic POSIX shell) you can use arrays instead; I'll get to that.
You're using relative file paths everywhere, and cding in the script. This tends to be fragile and confusing, since file paths are different at different places in the script, and any relative paths passed in by the user will become invalid the first time the script cds somewhere else. Worse, you aren't checking for errors when you cd, so if any cd fails for any reason, then entire rest of the script will run in the wrong place and fail bizarrely. You'd be far better off figuring out where your system's root directory is (as an absolute path), then referencing everything from it (e.g. < "$module_root/modules/$name/args.conf").
Actually, you're not checking for errors anywhere. It's generally a good idea, when writing any sort of program, to try to think of what can go wrong and how your program should respond (and also to expect that things you didn't think of will also go wrong). Some people like to use set -e to make their scripts exit if any simple command fails, but this doesn't always do what you'd expect. I prefer to explicitly test the exit status of the commands in my script, with something like:
command1 || {
echo 'command1 failed!' >&2
exit 1
}
if command2; then
echo 'command2 succeeded!' >&2
else
echo 'command2 failed!' >&2
exit 1
fi
You're creating temp files in the current directory, which risks random conflicts (with other runs of the script at the same time, any files that happen to have names you're using, etc). It's better to create a temp directory at the beginning, then store everything in it (again, by absolute path):
module_tmp="$(mktemp -dt module-system)" || {
echo "Error creating temp directory" >&2
exit 1
}
...
echo "$answer" >> "$module_tmp/arglist.tmp"
(BTW, note that I'm using $() instead of backticks. They're easier to read, and don't have some subtle syntactic oddities that backticks have. I recommend switching.)
Speaking of which, you're overusing temp files; a lot of what you're doing with can be done just fine with shell variables and built-in shell features. For example, rather than reading line from the config file, then storing them in a temp file and using cut to split them into fields, you can simply echo to cut:
arg="$(echo "$line" | cut -d ";" -f 1)"
...or better yet, use read's built-in ability to split fields based on whatever IFS is set to:
while IFS=";" read -u3 arg requ description; do
(Note that since the assignment to IFS is a prefix to the read command, it only affects that one command; changing IFS globally can have weird effects, and should be avoided whenever possible.)
Similarly, storing the argument list in a file, converting newlines to spaces into another file, then reading that file... you can skip any or all of these steps. If you're using bash, store the arg list in an array:
arglist=()
while ...
arglist+=("$answer") # or ("#arg=$answer")? Not sure of your syntax.
done ...
"$module_root/modules/$name/$interpreter" "$file" "${arglist[#]}"
(That messy syntax, with the double-quotes, curly braces, square brackets, and at-sign, is the generally correct way to expand an array in bash).
If you can't count on bash extensions like arrays, you can at least do it the old messy way with a plain variable:
arglist=""
while ...
arglist="$arglist $answer" # or "$arglist $arg=$answer"? Not sure of your syntax.
done ...
"$module_root/modules/$name/$interpreter" "$file" $arglist
... but this runs the risk of arguments being word-split and/or expanded to lists of files.

Shell Script Edit Files Line

I am not that good on linux shell script and I need little help.
I want to edit a file via script (finding the line and edit).
The Original line is:
# JVM_OPTS="$JVM_OPTS -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=< hostname >"
I want to uncomment and replaye hostname with 127.0.0.1
JVM_OPTS="$JVM_OPTS -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=127.0.0.1"
You can refer to the set command, change the filename with the name you are working at,
sed -i 's## JVM_OPTS="$JVM_OPTS -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=< hostname >"#JVM_OPTS="$JVM_OPTS -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=127.0.0.1"#' filename
Fine answers, but they don't do anything by way of TEACHING the gentleman how and why it works.
If you were using the mundane text editor, ed, you would use three commands after invoking the command "ed filename":
s/^# //
s/< hostname>/127.0.0.1/
w
So, you can use a pipe to submit those commands directly to ed, specifying "-" as its first argument so that it doesn't bother you by reporting character counts upon reading in and writing out the file:
( echo 's/^# //'; echo 's//127.0.0.1/'; echo w ) | ed - filename
You don't need to echo 'q' also because ed will automatically quit when it runs out of input or encounters "end of file" (you can simulate this on the keyboard by just hitting the CTRL-D key rather than actually typing q ).
Here's one way to do it:
sed -i -e 's/# \(JVM_OPTS=.*=\).*/\1127.0.0.1"/' path/to/file
That is, replace the line with the text captured within the group \(JVM_OPTS=.*=\), so everything from JVM_OPTS= until another = sign, and append 127.0.0.1" to the end.
If there might be other lines in the file starting with # JVM_OPTS=,
then you could make the pattern matching more strict, for example:
sed -i -e 's/# \(JVM_OPTS="$JVM_OPTS -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=\).*/\1127.0.0.1"/' path/to/file

bash: How can I assemble the string: `"filename=output_0.csv"`

I am using a bash script to execute a program. The program must take the following argument. (The program is gnuplot.)
gnuplot -e "filename='output_0.csv'" 'plot.p'
I need to be able to assemble the following string: "filename='output_0.csv'"
My plan is to assemble the string STRING=filename='output_0.csv' and then do the following: gnuplot -r "$STRING" 'plot.p'. Note I left the words STRING without stackoverflow syntax style highlighting to emphasise the string I want to produce.
I'm not particularly proficient at bash, and so I have no idea how to do this.
I think that strings can be concatenated by using STRING="$STRING"stuff to append to string? I think that may be required?
As an extra layer of complication the value 0 is actually an integer which should increment by 1 each time the program is run. (Done by a for loop.) If I have n=1 in my program, how can I replace the 0 in the string by the "string value" or text version of the integer n?
A safest way to append something to an existing string would be to include squiggly brackets and quotes:
STRING="something"
STRING="${STRING}else"
You can create the "dynamic" portion of your command line with something like this:
somevalue=0
STRING="filename='output_${somevalue}.csv'"
There are other tools like printf which can handle more complex formatting.
somevalue=1
fmt="filename='output_%s.csv'"
STRING="$(printf "$fmt" "$somevalue")"
Regarding your "extra layer of complication", I gather that this increment has to happen in such a way as to store the value somewhere outside the program, or you'd be able to use a for loop to handle things. You can use temporary files for this:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Specify our counter file
counter=/tmp/my_counter
# If it doesn't exist, "prime" it with zero
if [ ! -f "$counter" ]; then
echo "0" > $counter
fi
# And if it STILL doesn't exist, fail.
if [ ! -f "$counter" ]; then
echo "ERROR: can't create counter." >&2
fi
# Read the last value...
read value < "$counter"
# and set up our string, per your question.
STRING="$(printf "filename='output_%d.csv'" "${value}")"
# Last, run your command, and if it succeeds, update the stored counter.
gnuplot -e "$STRING" 'plot.p' && echo "$((value + 1))" > $counter
As always, there's more than one way to solve this problem. With luck, this will give you a head start on your reading of the bash man page and other StackOverflow questions which will help you learn what you need!
An answer was posted, which I thought I had accepted already, but for some reason it has been deleted, possibly because it didn't quite answer the question.
I posted another similar question, and the answer to that helped me also answer this question. You can find said question and answer here: bash: Execute a string as a command

Bash Script to Comment/uncomment lines in file [closed]

Closed. This question needs debugging details. It is not currently accepting answers.
Edit the question to include desired behavior, a specific problem or error, and the shortest code necessary to reproduce the problem. This will help others answer the question.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
I have a standard text configuration file in Linux (Fedora 20). Most lines should apply all the time, but a few lines need to be "turned on" (uncommented) and "turned off" depending on the machine the file is on. So the file looks like this:
; configuration file
parameter1 = a
parameter2 = b
optparameter1 = z ; only applies to %%machine-1%%
; optparameter1 = x ; only applies to %%machine-2%%
parameter3 = c
; optparameter2 = x ; only applies to %%machine-2%%
optparameter2 = f ; only applies to %%machine-1%%
What I would like to do is run a script that would change the file (or copy the file) altering commenting of the lines based on command line parameters. e.g.
./scriptname -u machine-2 -c machine-1 configurationFileName.conf
This would cause all lines with %%machine-2%% in the end comment to be uncommented (of course, leaving the end comments in tact), and all lines with %%machine-1%% in the end comment to be commented.
Any suggestions on how to do this? Thank you.
The following script will allow you to "turn on" and "turn off" specific lines. In your case, it will "turn off" all lines containing machine-2 and "turn on" lines containing machine-1. The script is as follows:
comm=$1
uncomm=$2
filename=$3
sed -i -e "/$comm/s/^;*/;/" $filename
sed -i -e "/$uncomm/s/^;//" $filename
You run it like this:
./scriptname machine-2 machine-1 configurationFileName.conf
The first sed command adds a semicolon (;) to the lines containing the variable $match, if the line is already commented, it leaves it as is. The second one removes semicolons from the beginning of a line.
Enable config for machine1 (and disable config for machine2) :
$ sed -i -e 's/^;* *\(.*machine-1.*\)/\1/p' \
-e 's/^\(.*machine-2.*\)/;\1/p' configurationFileName.conf
Enable config for machine2 (and disable config for machine1) :
$ sed -i -e 's/^;* *\(.*machine-2.*\)/\1/p' \
-e 's/^\(.*machine-1.*\)/;\1/p' configurationFileName.conf
Be careful because the '-i' sed option will directly modify the "configurationFileName.conf" file.

How to show line number when executing bash script

I have a test script which has a lot of commands and will generate lots of output, I use set -x or set -v and set -e, so the script would stop when error occurs. However, it's still rather difficult for me to locate which line did the execution stop in order to locate the problem.
Is there a method which can output the line number of the script before each line is executed?
Or output the line number before the command exhibition generated by set -x?
Or any method which can deal with my script line location problem would be a great help.
Thanks.
You mention that you're already using -x. The variable PS4 denotes the value is the prompt printed before the command line is echoed when the -x option is set and defaults to : followed by space.
You can change PS4 to emit the LINENO (The line number in the script or shell function currently executing).
For example, if your script reads:
$ cat script
foo=10
echo ${foo}
echo $((2 + 2))
Executing it thus would print line numbers:
$ PS4='Line ${LINENO}: ' bash -x script
Line 1: foo=10
Line 2: echo 10
10
Line 3: echo 4
4
http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/scripting/debuggingtips gives the ultimate PS4 that would output everything you will possibly need for tracing:
export PS4='+(${BASH_SOURCE}:${LINENO}): ${FUNCNAME[0]:+${FUNCNAME[0]}(): }'
In Bash, $LINENO contains the line number where the script currently executing.
If you need to know the line number where the function was called, try $BASH_LINENO. Note that this variable is an array.
For example:
#!/bin/bash
function log() {
echo "LINENO: ${LINENO}"
echo "BASH_LINENO: ${BASH_LINENO[*]}"
}
function foo() {
log "$#"
}
foo "$#"
See here for details of Bash variables.
PS4 with value $LINENO is what you need,
E.g. Following script (myScript.sh):
#!/bin/bash -xv
PS4='${LINENO}: '
echo "Hello"
echo "World"
Output would be:
./myScript.sh
+echo Hello
3 : Hello
+echo World
4 : World
Workaround for shells without LINENO
In a fairly sophisticated script I wouldn't like to see all line numbers; rather I would like to be in control of the output.
Define a function
echo_line_no () {
grep -n "$1" $0 | sed "s/echo_line_no//"
# grep the line(s) containing input $1 with line numbers
# replace the function name with nothing
} # echo_line_no
Use it with quotes like
echo_line_no "this is a simple comment with a line number"
Output is
16 "this is a simple comment with a line number"
if the number of this line in the source file is 16.
This basically answers the question How to show line number when executing bash script for users of ash or other shells without LINENO.
Anything more to add?
Sure. Why do you need this? How do you work with this? What can you do with this? Is this simple approach really sufficient or useful? Why do you want to tinker with this at all?
Want to know more? Read reflections on debugging
Simple (but powerful) solution: Place echo around the code you think that causes the problem and move the echo line by line until the messages does not appear anymore on screen - because the script has stop because of an error before.
Even more powerful solution: Install bashdb the bash debugger and debug the script line by line
If you're using $LINENO within a function, it will cache the first occurrence. Instead use ${BASH_LINENO[0]}

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