I'm currently making a shell program and I want to display the total amount of bytes in a specific file using the pipe command. I know that the pipe command takes whatever is on the left side and gives it to the right as input. (Assuming you are in the directory the file is in)
I know that the command (wc -c) displays the number of bytes in a file but I'm not sure how to pipe it. What I've tried was:
ls fileName.sh | wc -c
wc takes the filename as argument, not as input. Try this:
wc -c fileName.sh
The wc program takes multiple arguments. You can do this to apply it to all entries in the current working directory:
wc -c $(ls)
Another approach is to use xargs to convert input to arguments:
ls | xargs wc -c
You may need to use a more complex line if you have spaces in your filenames. ls can output a single file per line, and xargs can be told to split only on \n:
ls -1 | xargs -d '\n' wc -c
If you prefer to use find instead of ls (a more powerful tool), the -print0 option for find plays along with the -0 option to xargs.
Related
I want to pass each output from a command as multiple argument to a second command, e.g.:
grep "pattern" input
returns:
file1
file2
file3
and I want to copy these outputs, e.g:
cp file1 file1.bac
cp file2 file2.bac
cp file3 file3.bac
How can I do that in one go? Something like:
grep "pattern" input | cp $1 $1.bac
You can use xargs:
grep 'pattern' input | xargs -I% cp "%" "%.bac"
You can use $() to interpolate the output of a command. So, you could use kill -9 $(grep -hP '^\d+$' $(ls -lad /dir/*/pid | grep -P '/dir/\d+/pid' | awk '{ print $9 }')) if you wanted to.
In addition to Chris Jester-Young good answer, I would say that xargs is also a good solution for these situations:
grep ... `ls -lad ... | awk '{ print $9 }'` | xargs kill -9
will make it. All together:
grep -hP '^\d+$' `ls -lad /dir/*/pid | grep -P '/dir/\d+/pid' | awk '{ print $9 }'` | xargs kill -9
For completeness, I'll also mention command substitution and explain why this is not recommended:
cp $(grep -l "pattern" input) directory/
(The backtick syntax cp `grep -l "pattern" input` directory/ is roughly equivalent, but it is obsolete and unwieldy; don't use that.)
This will fail if the output from grep produces a file name which contains whitespace or a shell metacharacter.
Of course, it's fine to use this if you know exactly which file names the grep can produce, and have verified that none of them are problematic. But for a production script, don't use this.
Anyway, for the OP's scenario, where you need to refer to each match individually and add an extension to it, the xargs or while read alternatives are superior anyway.
In the worst case (meaning problematic or unspecified file names), pass the matches to a subshell via xargs:
grep -l "pattern" input |
xargs -r sh -c 'for f; do cp "$f" "$f.bac"; done' _
... where obviously the script inside the for loop could be arbitrarily complex.
In the ideal case, the command you want to run is simple (or versatile) enough that you can simply pass it an arbitrarily long list of file names. For example, GNU cp has a -t option to facilitate this use of xargs (the -t option allows you to put the destination directory first on the command line, so you can put as many files as you like at the end of the command):
grep -l "pattern" input | xargs cp -t destdir
which will expand into
cp -t destdir file1 file2 file3 file4 ...
for as many matches as xargs can fit onto the command line of cp, repeated as many times as it takes to pass all the files to cp. (Unfortunately, this doesn't match the OP's scenario; if you need to rename every file while copying, you need to pass in just two arguments per cp invocation: the source file name and the destination file name to copy it to.)
So in other words, if you use the command substitution syntax and grep produces a really long list of matches, you risk bumping into ARG_MAX and "Argument list too long" errors; but xargs will specifically avoid this by instead copying only as many arguments as it can safely pass to cp at a time, and running cp multiple times if necessary instead.
The above will still work incorrectly if you have file names which contain newlines. Perhaps see also https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/020
#!/bin/bash
for f in files; do
if grep -q PATTERN "$f"; then
echo cp -v "$f" "${f}.bac"
fi
done
files can be *.txt or *.text which basically means files ending in *.txt or *text or replace with something that you want/need, of course replace PATTERN with yours. Remove echo if you're satisfied with the output. For a recursive solution take a look at the bash shell option globstar
I am new to linux. I have a folder with many files in it and i need to get the latest file depending on the file name. Example: I have 3 files RAT_20190111.txt RAT_20190212.txt RAT_20190321.txt . I need a linux command to move the latest file here RAT20190321.txt to a specific directory.
If file pattern remains the same then you can try below command :
mv $(ls RAT*|sort -r|head -1) /path/to/directory/
As pointed out by #wwn, there is no need to use sort, Since the files are lexicographically sortable ls should do the job already of sorting them so the command will become :
mv $(ls RAT*|tail -1) /path/to/directory
The following command works.
ls | grep -v '/$' |sort | tail -n 1 | xargs -d '\n' -r mv -- /path/to/directory
The command first splits output of ls with newline. Then sorts it, takes the last file and then it moves this to the required directory.
Hope it helps.
Use the below command
cp ls |tail -n 1 /data...
I have the following files :
#ls
test test2 test3 test4
now according to xargs -0 the input is trimmed based on null instead of whitespace, hence as there is no null in my input the 4 files should be printed in one echo command . The result is one echo command However there is a new line between each file :
#ls | xargs -0
test
test2
test3
test4
To be sure there is one command only :
ls | xargs -0 -p
echo test
test2
test3
test4
?...n
why there is new line between each file ?
When ls prints to a TTY it formats the file names in columns, but when it's writing to a file, pipe, or other non-TTY it behaves like ls -1 and prints one file name per line. You can check this by running ls | cat in place of ls.
With ls | xargs -0, the newlines are coming from ls, not from xargs. xargs is indeed reading a single string as you expect it to, but that string has newlines.
See also:
BashFAQ - Why you shouldn't parse the output of ls(1)
You are not supplying a command to xargs which is unusual. The default command xargs uses when none is supplied is /bin/echo. xargs reads the output from ls and splits it into words; each word becomes a parameter for the command xargs executes. The -0 option makes the null character the word delimiter used for the splitting. Because null does not appear in the output of ls, the entire output is considered one word and passed to /bin/echo as a single parameter, effectively resulting in the command line
/bin/echo 'test
test2
test3
test4'
That the output from ls contains newlines, on the other hand, is a property of ls when the putput is not a terminal, as John correctly explained.
When xarging over files use find instead of ls!
$ find /my/path -print0 | xargs -0 -p
With -print0 you can handle also files where space (0x20) is used in filename.
I have seen the Inone option for linux command xargs ,but I googled and did not find out what the option means.
seq 2 | xargs -Inone cat file
Using seq with xargs:
This is a clever use of xargs and seq to avoid writing a loop. It is basically the equivalent of:
for i in {1..2}; do
cat file
done
That is, it will run cat file once for each line of output from the seq command. The -Inone simply prevents xargs from appending the value read from seq to the command; see the xargs man page for details on the -I option:
-I replace-str
Replace occurrences of replace-str in the initial-ar‐
guments with names read from standard input. Also,
unquoted blanks do not terminate input items; instead
the separator is the newline character. Implies -x
and -L 1.
I want to store the result of a command to a variable in my shell script. I cant seem to get it to work. I want the most recently dated file in the directory.
PRODUCT= 'ls -t /some/dir/file* | head -1 | xargs -n1 basename'
it wont work
you have two options, either $ or backsticks`.
1) x=$(ls -t /some/dir/file* | head -1 | xargs -n1 basename)
or
2) x=`ls -t /some/dir/file* | head -1 | xargs -n1 basename`
echo $x
Edit: removing unnecessary bracket for (2).
The problem that you're having is that the command needs to be surrounded by back-ticks rather than single quotes. This is known as 'Command Substitution'.
Bash allows you to use $() for command substitution, but this is not available in all shells. I don't know if it's available in KSH; if it is, it's probably not available in all versions.
If the $() syntax is available in your version of ksh, you should definitely use it; it's easier to read (back ticks are too easy to confuse with single quotes); back-ticks are also hard to nest.
This only addresses one of the problems with your command, however: ls returns directories as well as files, so if the most recent thing modified in the specified directory is a sub-directory, that is what you will see.
If you only want to see files, I suggest using some version of the following (I'm using Bash, which supports default variables, you'll probably have to play around with the syntax of $1)
lastfile ()
{
find ${1:-.} -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf "%T+ %p\n" | sort -n | tail -1 | sed 's/[^[:space:]]\+ //'
}
This runs find on the directory, and only pulls files from that directory. It formats all of the files like this:
2012-08-29+16:21:40.0000000000 ./.sqlite_history
2013-01-14+08:52:14.0000000000 ./.davmail.properties
2012-04-04+16:16:40.0000000000 ./.DS_Store
2010-04-21+15:49:00.0000000000 ./.joe_state
2008-09-05+17:15:28.0000000000 ./.hplip.conf
2012-01-31+13:12:28.0000000000 ./.oneclick
sorts the list, takes the last line, and chops off everything before the first space.
You want $() (preferred) or backticks (``) (older style), rather than single quotes:
PRODUCT=$(ls -t /some/dir/file* | head -1 | xargs -n1 basename)
or
PRODUCT=`ls -t /some/dir/file* | head -1 | xargs -n1 basename`
You need both quotes to ensure you keep the name even if it contains spaces, and also in case you later want more than 1 file, and "$(..)" to run commands in background
I believe you also need the '-1' option to ls, otherwise you could have several names per lines (you only keep 1 line, but it could be several files)
PRODUCT="$(ls -1t /some/dir/file* | head -1 | xargs -n1 basename)"
Please do not put space around the "=" variable assignments (as I saw on other solutions here) , as it's not very compatible as well.
I would do something like:
Your version corrected:
PRODUCT=$(ls -t /some/dir/file* | head -1 | xargs -n1 basename)
Or simpler:
PRODUCT=$(cd /some/dir && ls -1t file* | head -1)
change to the directory
list one filename per line and sort by time/date
grab the first line