I am trying to replace a sed command with a sed command and it keeps falling over so after a few hours of "picket fencing" I thought I would ask the question here.
I have various bash scripts that contain this kind of line:
sed 's/a hard coded server name servername.//'
I would like to replace it with:
sed "s/a hard coded server name $(hostname).//"
Note the addition of double quotes so that the $(hostname) is expanded which make this a little trickier than I expected.
So this was my first of many failed attempts:
cat file | sed 's!sed \'s\/a hard coded server name servername.\/\/\'!sed \"s\/a hard coded server name $(hostname).\/\/\"!g'
I also tried using sed's nice "-e" option to break down the replace into parts to try and target the problem areas. I wouldn't use the "-e" switch in a solution but it is useful sometimes for debugging:
cat file | sed -e 's!servername!\$\(hostname\)!' -e 's!\| sed \'s!\| sed \"s!'
The first sed works as expected (nothing fancy happening here) and the second fails so no point adding the third that would have to replace the closing double quote.
At this point my history descends into chaos so no point adding any more failed attempts.
I wanted to use the first replacement in a single command as the script is full of sed commands and I wanted to target just one specific command in the script.
Any ideas would be appreciated.
Here's how you could do it in awk if you ignore (or handle) metachars in the old and new text like you would with sed:
$ awk -v old="sed 's/a hard coded server name servername.//'" \
-v new="sed 's/a hard coded server name '\"\$(hostname)\"'.//' \
'{sub(old,new)}1' file
sed 's/a hard coded server name '"$(hostname)"'.//'
or to avoid having to deal with metachars, use only strings for the comparison and replacement:
$ awk -v old="sed 's/a hard coded server name servername.//'" \
-v new="sed 's/a hard coded server name '\"\$(hostname)\"'.//'" \
's=index($0,old){$0=substr($0,1,s-1) new substr($0,s+length(old))}1' file
sed 's/a hard coded server name '"$(hostname)"'.//'
Follow the behavior of templating tools by using a sequence that should never appear in actual use and replace that. For example, using colons simply because they require less quoting:
#!/bin/bash
sed "s/:servername:/$(hostname)/g" <<EOF > my_new_script.bash
echo "This is :servername:"
EOF
I've used echo in the internal script for purposes of clarity. You could have equally used something like:
sed 's/complex substitution :servername:/inside quotes :servername:/'
which avoids quoting hassles because the outer sed is treating the here document as plain text.
Related
If I declare a variable within a bash script, and then try to operate on it with sed, I keep getting errors. I've tried with double quotes, back ticks and avoiding single quotes on my variable. Here is what I'm essentially doing.
Call my script with multiple parameters
./myScript.sh apples oranges ilike,apples,oranges,bananas
My objective is to use sed to replace $3 "," with " ", then use wc -w to count how many words are in $3.
MyScript.sh
fruits="$3"
checkFruits= sed -i 's/,/ /g' <<< "$fruits"
echo $checkFruits
And the result after running the script in the terminal:
ilike,apples,oranges,bananas
sed: no input files
P.s. After countless google searches, reading suggestions and playing with my code, I simply cannot get this easy sample of code to work and I'm not really sure why. And I can't try to implement the wc -w until I move past this block.
You can do
fruits="$3"
checkFruits="${3//,/ }"
# or
echo "${3//,/ }"
The -i flag to sed requires a file argument, without it the sed command does what you expect.
However, I'd consider using tr instead of sed for this simple replacement:
fruits="$3"
checkFruits="$(tr , ' ' <<< $fruits)"
echo $checkFruits
Looking at the larger picture, do you want to count comma-separated strings, or the number of words once you have changed commas into spaces? For instance, do you want the string "i like,apples,oranges,and bananas" to return a count of 4, or 6? (This question is moot if you are 100% sure you will never have spaces in your input data.)
If 6, then the other answers (including mine) will already work.
However, if you want the answer to be 4, then you might want to do something else, like:
fruits="$3"
checkFruits="$(tr , \\n <<< $fruits)"
itemCount="$(wc -l <<< $checkFruits)"
Of course this can be condensed a little, but just throwing out the question as to what you're really doing. When asking a question here, it's good to post your expected results along with the input data and the code you've already used to try to solve the problem.
The -i option is for inplace editing of input file, you don't need it here.
To assign a command's output to a variable, use command expansion like var=$(command).
fruits="$3"
checkFruits=$(sed 's/,/ /g' <<< "$fruits")
echo $checkFruits
You don't need sed at all.
IFS=, read -a things <<< "$3"
echo "${#things[#]}"
This question already has answers here:
Replace whole line when match found with sed
(4 answers)
Closed 4 years ago.
How do I find line starts with and replace complete line?
File output:
xyz
abc
/dev/linux-test1/
Code:
output=/dev/sda/windows
sed 's/^/dev/linux*/$output/g' file.txt
I am getting below Error:
sed: -e expression #1, char 9: unknown option to `s'
File Output expected after replacement:
xyz
abc
/dev/sda/windows
Let's take this in small steps.
First we try changing "dev" to "other":
sed 's/dev/other/' file.txt
/other/linux-test1/
(Omitting the other lines.) So far, so good. Now "/dev/" => "/other/":
sed 's//dev///other//' file.txt
sed: 1: "s//dev///other//": bad flag in substitute command: '/'
Ah, it's confused, we're using '/' as both a command delimiter and literal text. So we use a different delimiter, like '|':
sed 's|/dev/|/other/|' file.txt
/other/linux-test1/
Good. Now we try to replace the whole line:
sed 's|^/dev/linux*|/other/|' file.txt
/other/-test1/
It didn't replace the whole line... Ah, in sed, '*' means the previous character repeated any number of times. So we precede it with '.', which means any character:
sed 's|^/dev/linux.*|/other/|' file.txt
/other/
Now to introduce the variable:
sed 's|^/dev/linux.*|$output|' file.txt
$output
The shell didn't expand the variable, because of the single quotes. We change to double quotes:
sed "s|^/dev/linux.*|$output|" file.txt
/dev/sda/windows
This might work for you (GNU sed):
output="/dev/sda/windows"; sed -i '\#/dev/linux.*/#c'"$output" file
Set the shell variable and change the line addressed by /dev/linux.*/ to it.
N.B. The shell variable needs to interpolated hence the ; i.e. the variable may be set on a line on its own. Also the the delimiter for the sed address must be changed so as not to interfere with the address, hence \#...#, and finally the shell variable should be enclosed in double quotes to allow full interpolation.
I'd recommend not doing it this way. Here's why.
Sed is not a programming language. It's a stream editor with some constructs that look and behave like a language, but it offers very little in the way of arbitrary string manipulation, format control, etc.
Sed only takes data from a file or stdin (also a file). Embedding strings within your sed script is asking for errors -- constructs like s/re/$output/ are destined to fail at some point, almost regardless of what workarounds you build into your sed script. The best solutions for making sed commands like this work is to do your input sanitization OUTSIDE of sed.
Which brings me to ... this may be the wrong tool for this job, or might be only one component of the toolset for the job.
The error you're getting is obviously because the sed command you're using is horribly busted. The substitute command is:
s/pattern/replacement/flags
but the command you're running is:
s/^/dev/linux*/$output/g
The pattern you're searching for is ^, the null at the beginning of the line. Your replacement pattern is dev, then you have a bunch of text that might be interpreted as flags. This plainly doesn't work, when your search string contains the same character that you're using as a delimiter to the options for the substitute command.
In regular expressions and in sed, you can escape things. You while you might get some traction with s/^\/dev\/linux.*/$output/, you'd still run into difficulty if $output contained slashes. If you're feeding this script to sed from bash, you could use ${output//\//\\\/}, but you can't handle those escapes within sed itself. Sed has no variables.
In a proper programming language, you'd have better separation of variable content and the commands used for the substitution.
output="/dev/sda/windows"
awk -v output="$output" '$1~/\/dev\/linux/ { $0=output } 1' file.txt
Note that I've used $1 here because in your question, your input lines (and output) appear to have a space at the beginning of each line. Awk automatically trims leading and trailing space when assigning field (positional) variables.
Or you could even do this in pure bash, using no external tools:
output="/dev/sda/windows"
while read -r line; do
[[ "$line" =~ ^/dev/linux ]] && line="$output"
printf '%s\n' "$line"
done < file.txt
This one isn't resilient in the face of leading whitespace. Salt to taste.
So .. yes, you can do this with sed. But the way commands get put together in sed makes something like this risky, and despite the available workarounds like switching your substitution command delimiter to another character, you'd almost certainly be better off using other tools.
I'm new to shell scripting. My requirement is to retrieve lines between two pattern, its working fine if I run it from the terminal without using variables inside sed cmd. But the problem arises when I put all those below cmd in a file and tried to execute it.
#!/bin/sh
word="ajp-qdcls2228.us.qdx.com%2F156.30.35.204-8009-34"
upto="2017-01-03 23:00"
fileC=`cat test.log`
output=`echo $fileC | sed -e "n/\$word/$upto/p"`
printf '%s\n' "$output"
If I use the below cmd in the terminal it works fine
sed -n '/ajp-qdcls2228.us.qdx.com%2F156.30.35.204-8009-34/,/2017-01-03 23:00/ p' test.log
Please suggest a workaround.
If we put aside for a moment the fact you shouldn't cat a file to a variable and then echo it for sed filtering, the reason why your command is not working is because you're not quoting the file content variable, fileC when echoing. This will munge together multiple whitespace characters and turn them into a single space. So, you're losing newlines from the file, as well as multiple spaces, tabs, etc.
To fix it, you can write:
fileC=$(cat test.log)
output=$(echo "$fileC" | sed -n "/$word/,/$upto/p")
Note the double-quotes around fileC (and a fixed sed expression, similar to your second example). Without the quotes (try echo $fileC), your fileC is expanded (with the default IFS) into a series of words, each being one argument to echo, and echo will just print those words separated with a single space. Additionally, if the file contains some of the globbing characters (like *), those patterns are also expanded. This is a common bash pitfall.
Much better would be to write it like this:
output=$(sed -n "/$word/,/$upto/p" test.log)
And if your patterns include some of the sed metacharacters, you should really escape them before using with sed, like this:
escape() {
sed 's/[^^]/[&]/g; s/\^/\\^/g' <<<"$1";
}
output=$(sed -n "/$(escape "$word")/,/$(escape "$upto")/ p" test.log)
The correct approach will be something like:
word="ajp-qdcls2228.us.qdx.com%2F156.30.35.204-8009-34"
upto="2017-01-03 23:00"
awk -v beg="$word" -v end="$upto" '$0==beg{f=1} f{print; if ($0==end) exit}' file
but until we see your sample input and output we can't know for sure what it is you need to match on (full lines, partial lines, all text on one line, etc.) or what you want to print (include delimiters, exclude one, exclude both, etc.).
I am quite new to shell scripting.
I am scraping a website and the scraped text contains a lot of repetitions. Usually they are the menus on a forum, for example. Mostly, I do this in Python, but I thought that sed command will save me reading and printing the input, loops etc. I want to delete thousands of repeated lines from the same single file. I do not want to copy it to another file, because I will end up with 100 new files. The following is a shadow script which I run from the bash shell.
#!/bin/sed -f
sed -i '/^how$/d' input_file.txt
sed -i '/^is test$/d' input_file.txt
sed -i '/^repeated text/d' input_file.txt
This is the content of the input file:
how to do this task
why it is not working
this is test
Stackoverflow is a very helpful community of programmers
that is test
this is text
repeated text is common
this is repeated text of the above line
Then I run in the shell the following command:
sed -f scriptFile input_file.txt
I get the following error
sed: scriptFile line 2: untermindated `s' command
How can I correct the script, and what is the correct syntax of the command I should use to get it work?
Any help is highly appreciated.
assuming you know what your script is doing, it's very easy to put them into a script. in your case, the script should be:
/^how$/d
/^is test$/d
/^repeated text/d
that's good enough.
to make the script alone to be executable is easy too:
#!/usr/bin/env sed -f
/^how$/d
/^is test$/d
/^repeated text/d
then
chmod +x your_sed_script
./your_sed_script <old >new
here is a very good and compact tutorial. you can learn a lot from it.
following is an example from the site, just in case the link is dead:
If you have a large number of sed commands, you can put them into a file and use
sed -f sedscript <old >new
where sedscript could look like this:
# sed comment - This script changes lower case vowels to upper case
s/a/A/g
s/e/E/g
s/i/I/g
s/o/O/g
s/u/U/g
Wouldn't it be easier to do it with egrep followed by a mv, for example
egrep -v 'pattern1|pattern2|pattern3|...' <input_file.txt >tmpfile.txt
mv tmpfile.txt input_file.txt
Each pattern would describe the lines being deleted, much like in sed. You would not end up with additional files, because the mv removes them.
If you have so many pattern, that you don't want to specify them directly on the command line, you can store them in a file use the -f option of egrep.
I have a huge SQL file that gets executed on the server. The dump is from my machine and in it there are a few settings relating to my machine. So basically, I want every occurance of "c://temp" to be replace by "//home//some//blah"
How can this be done from the command line?
sed is a good choice for large files.
sed -i.bak -e 's%C://temp%//home//some//blah%' large_file.sql
It is a good choice because doesn't read the whole file at once to change it. Quoting the manual:
A stream editor is used to perform
basic text transformations on an input
stream (a file or input from a
pipeline). While in some ways similar
to an editor which permits scripted
edits (such as ed), sed works by
making only one pass over the
input(s), and is consequently more
efficient. But it is sed's ability to
filter text in a pipeline which
particularly distinguishes it from
other types of editors.
The relevant manual section is here. A small explanation follows
-i.bak enables in place editing leaving a backup copy with .bak extension
s%foo%bar% uses s, the substitution command, which
substitutes matches of first string
in between the % sign, 'foo', for the second
string, 'bar'. It's usually written as s//
but because your strings have plenty
of slashes, it's more convenient to
change them for something else so you
avoid having to escape them.
Example
vinko#mithril:~$ sed -i.bak -e 's%C://temp%//home//some//blah%' a.txt
vinko#mithril:~$ more a.txt
//home//some//blah
D://temp
//home//some//blah
D://temp
vinko#mithril:~$ more a.txt.bak
C://temp
D://temp
C://temp
D://temp
Just for completeness. In place replacement using perl.
perl -i -p -e 's{c://temp}{//home//some//blah}g' mysql.dmp
No backslash escapes required either. ;)
Try sed? Something like:
sed 's/c:\/\/temp/\/\/home\/\/some\/\/blah/' mydump.sql > fixeddump.sql
Escaping all those slashes makes this look horrible though, here's a simpler example which changes foo to bar.
sed 's/foo/bar/' mydump.sql > fixeddump.sql
As others have noted, you can choose your own delimiter, which would prevent the leaning toothpick syndrome in this case:
sed 's|c://temp\\|home//some//blah|' mydump.sql > fixeddump.sql
The clever thing about sed is that it operating on a stream rather than a file all at once, so you can process huge files using only a modest amount of memory.
There's also a non-standard UNIX utility, rpl, which does the exact same thing that the sed examples do; however, I'm not sure whether rpl operates streamwise, so sed may be the better option here.
The sed command can do that.
Rather than escaping the slashes, you can choose a different delimiter (_ in this case):
sed -e 's_c://temp/_/home//some//blah/_' file1.txt > file2.txt
perl -pi -e 's#c://temp#//home//some//blah#g' yourfilename
The -p will treat this script as a loop, it will read the specified file line by line running the regex search and replace.
-i This flag should be used in conjunction with the -p flag. This commands Perl to edit the file in place.
-e Just means execute this perl code.
Good luck
gawk
awk '{gsub("c://temp","//home//some//blah")}1' file