I am trying to change the values in a text file using sed in a Bash script with the line,
sed 's/draw($prev_number;n_)/draw($number;n_)/g' file.txt > tmp
This will be in a for loop. Why is it not working?
Variables inside ' don't get substituted in Bash. To get string substitution (or interpolation, if you're familiar with Perl) you would need to change it to use double quotes " instead of the single quotes:
# Enclose the entire expression in double quotes
$ sed "s/draw($prev_number;n_)/draw($number;n_)/g" file.txt > tmp
# Or, concatenate strings with only variables inside double quotes
# This would restrict expansion to the relevant portion
# and prevent accidental expansion for !, backticks, etc.
$ sed 's/draw('"$prev_number"';n_)/draw('"$number"';n_)/g' file.txt > tmp
# A variable cannot contain arbitrary characters
# See link in the further reading section for details
$ a='foo
bar'
$ echo 'baz' | sed 's/baz/'"$a"'/g'
sed: -e expression #1, char 9: unterminated `s' command
Further Reading:
Difference between single and double quotes in Bash
Is it possible to escape regex metacharacters reliably with sed
Using different delimiters for sed substitute command
Unless you need it in a different file you can use the -i flag to change the file in place
Variables within single quotes are not expanded, but within double quotes they are. Use double quotes in this case.
sed "s/draw($prev_number;n_)/draw($number;n_)/g" file.txt > tmp
You could also make it work with eval, but don’t do that!!
This may help:
sed "s/draw($prev_number;n_)/draw($number;n_)/g"
You can use variables like below. Like here, I wanted to replace hostname i.e., a system variable in the file. I am looking for string look.me and replacing that whole line with look.me=<system_name>
sed -i "s/.*look.me.*/look.me=`hostname`/"
You can also store your system value in another variable and can use that variable for substitution.
host_var=`hostname`
sed -i "s/.*look.me.*/look.me=$host_var/"
Input file:
look.me=demonic
Output of file (assuming my system name is prod-cfm-frontend-1-usa-central-1):
look.me=prod-cfm-frontend-1-usa-central-1
I needed to input github tags from my release within github actions. So that on release it will automatically package up and push code to artifactory.
Here is how I did it. :)
- name: Invoke build
run: |
# Gets the Tag number from the release
TAGNUMBER=$(echo $GITHUB_REF | cut -d / -f 3)
# Setups a string to be used by sed
FINDANDREPLACE='s/${GITHUBACTIONSTAG}/'$(echo $TAGNUMBER)/
# Updates the setup.cfg file within version number
sed -i $FINDANDREPLACE setup.cfg
# Installs prerequisites and pushes
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
invoke build
Retrospectively I wish I did this in python with tests. However it was fun todo some bash.
Another variant, using printf:
SED_EXPR="$(printf -- 's/draw(%s;n_)/draw(%s;n_)/g' $prev_number $number)"
sed "${SED_EXPR}" file.txt
or in one line:
sed "$(printf -- 's/draw(%s;n_)/draw(%s;n_)/g' $prev_number $number)" file.txt
Using printf to build the replacement expression should be safe against all kinds of weird things, which is why I like this variant.
Related
This question already has answers here:
Replace whole line when match found with sed
(4 answers)
Closed 4 years ago.
How do I find line starts with and replace complete line?
File output:
xyz
abc
/dev/linux-test1/
Code:
output=/dev/sda/windows
sed 's/^/dev/linux*/$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 trying to write a bash script that adds a new line to a continually growing paragraph of a file. For every time I run the script it should add a new line to that paragraph but instead it returns the entire content of the file.
Here's my code...
function registerServiceProvider {
# register service provider inside config/app.php
sed '/App\Providers\*::class,/a \ App\Providers\${repoName}${provider}::class,' ./config/app.php
}
registerServiceProvider
By default sed prints the resulting stream to stdout. If you have GNU sed you can use -i to modify the file in-place. With many BSD sed you can use -i but it requires an argument which will be the extension added to the backup file created.
If you want to stay more POSIXy you can redirect the output to a new file, then move that temp file over the old name (or redirect the output to make sure you don't change the permissions). Don't try to do it with redirection in one step though, because the first thing the shell will do is truncate the file, then you'll try to read it and it will be empty.
So, with GNU sed you can do:
sed -i -e '/App\Providers\*::class,/a \ App\Providers\${repoName}${provider}::class,' ./config/app.php
or with BSD (or GNU, the argument works but is optional with GNU)
sed -i .bak -e '/App\Providers\*::class,/a \ App\Providers\${repoName}${provider}::class,' ./config/app.php
or portably
sed '/App\Providers\*::class,/a \ App\Providers\${repoName}${provider}::class,' ./config/app.php > tmp_paragraph
cat tmp_paragraph > ./config/app.php
rm tmp_paragraph
If you want the repoName and provider variables to be shell variables that get expanded you need to put the sed script in double quotes. bash doesn't expand variables inside single quoted strings. So to take the GNU sed example you would change it to use double quotes like so:
sed -i -e "/App\\\\Providers\\\\*::class,/a \\ App\\\\Providers\\\\${repoName}${provider}::class," ./config/app.php
and note that we had to do plenty of extra escaping of the slashes, since bash will treat them as escape characters inside double quotes. We can use the single quotes to help with that as long as we put the variables outside it though (and note that I'm still going to double the quotes because I think you meant to do that to get actual back slashes in those spots)
sed -i -e '/App\\Providers\\*::class,/a \ App\\Providers\\'${repoName}${provider}'::class,' ./config/app.php
We have couple of scripts where we want to replace variable evaluation method from $VAR_NAME to ${VAR_NAME}
This is required so that scripts will have uniform method for variable evaluation
I am thinking of using sed for the same, I wrote sample command which looks like follows,
echo "\$VAR_NAME" | sed 's/^$[_a-zA-Z0-9]*/${&}/g'
output for the same is
${$VAR_NAME}
Now i don't want $ inside {}, how can i remove it?
Any better suggestions for accomplishing this task?
EDIT
Following command works
echo "\$VAR_NAME" | sed -r 's/\$([_a-zA-Z]+)/${\1}/g'
EDIT1
I used following command to do replacement in script file
sed -i -r 's:\$([_a-zA-Z0-9]+):${\1}:g' <ScriptName>
Since the first part of your sed command searches for the $ and VAR_NAME, the whole $VAR_NAME part will be put inside the ${} wrapper.
You could search for the $ part with a lookbehind in your regular expression, so that you end up ending the sed call with /{&}/g as the $ will be to the left of your matched expression.
http://www.regular-expressions.info/lookaround.html
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=518444
I don't think sed supports this kind of regular expression, but you can make a command that begins perl -pe instead. I believe the following perl command may do what you want.
perl -p -e 's/(?<=\$)[_a-zA-Z0-9]*/{$&}/g'
PCRE Regex to SED
I have a file, and I am trying to use bask to replace all the contents of a substring with a path.
I can use the command:
sed -i s/{WORKSPACE}/$MYVARIABLE/g /var/lib/jenkins/jobs/MY-JOB/workspace/config/params.ini
My config/params.ini looks like:
[folders]
folder1 = {WORKSPACE}/subfolder1
folder2 = {WORKSPACE}/subfolder2
however, when $MYVARIABLE is a path, it fails (containing slashes), the sed command fails with:
sed: -e expression #1, char 16: unknown option to `s'
When I run through it manually, I see that the $MYVARIABLE needs to have it's path-slashes escaped. How can I modify my sed command to incorporate an escaped version of $MYVARIABLE?
There's nothing saying you have to use / as your delimiter. sed will use (almost) anything you stick in there. I have a tendency to use |, since that never (rarely?) appears in a path.
sridhar#century:~> export boong=FLEAK
sridhar#century:~> echo $PATH | sed "s|/bin|/$boong|g"
~/FLEAK:/usr/local/FLEAK:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/games:/FLEAK:/sbin:/usr/FLEAK:/usr/sbin:/usr/games:/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm:/home/oracle/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/server_1/FLEAK
sridhar#century:~>
Using double-quotes will allow the shell to do the variable-substitution.
Just escape the $ sign, and use a different delimiter:
sed -i 's;{WORKSPACE};\$MYVARIABLE;g' your_file
I'm trying to write a shell script that does a search and replace inside a configuration file upon start-up.
The string we're trying to replace is:
include /etc/nginx/https.include;
and we want to replace it with a commented version:
#include /etc/nginx/https.include;
The file that contains the string that we want to replace is:
/etc/nginx/app-servers.include
I'm not a Linux guru and can't seem to find the command to do this.
perl -p -i -e 's%^(include /etc/nginx/https.include;)$%#$1%' /etc/nginx/ap-servers.include
If the line might not end in the ;, use instead:
perl -p -i -e 's%^(include /etc/nginx/https.include;.*)$%#$1%' /etc/nginx/ap-servers.include
If you want to preserve the original file, add a backup extension after -i:
perl -p -i.bak -e 's%^(include /etc/nginx/https.include;)$%#$1%' /etc/nginx/ap-servers.include
Now, explaining. The -p flag means replace in-place. All lines of the file will be fed to the expression, and the result will be used as replacement. The -i flag indicates the extension of the backup file. By using it without anything, you prevent generation of backups. The -e tells Perl to get the following parameter as an expression to be executed.
Now, the expression is s%something%other%. I use % instead of the more traditional / to avoid having to escape the slashes of the path. I use parenthesis in the expression and $1 in the substituted expression for safety -- if you change one, the other will follow. Thus, %#$1% is actually the second % of s, followed by the desired #, $1 indicating the pattern inside parenthesis, and the last % of s.
HTH. HAND.
sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' config.txt
This replaces all instances of foo (case insensitive) with bar in the file config.txt
Check out sed:
sed -i -r 's|^(include /etc/nginx/https.include;)$|#\1|' /etc/nginx/app-servers.include
-i means do the substitution in-place and -r means to use extended regular expressions.
cd pathname
for y in `ls *`;
do sed "s/ABCD/DCBA/g" $y > temp; mv temp $y;
done
This script shold replace string ABCD to DCBA in all the files in pathname