Using grep -f when the file with patterns contains dots - linux

If I want to search for a string which contains a dot, in command line I can just prepend it with a backslash:
grep "string\." file.txt
or add -F -r parameters:
grep -F -r "string." file.txt
but there seems to be a problem if I want to use grep -f and have strings with dots inside the file with patterns.
I tried using quotes, prepending all the dots in the file with a backslash and using grep -F -r -f and even messed a bit with -E but none of these match the strings correctly without interpreting the dots as special characters.
How to achieve the desired behavior?

Insert a \ before .:
grep -f <(sed 's/\./\\./g' file_with_dots_inside.txt) file.txt

Related

grep: Invalid regular expression

I have a text file which looks like this:
haha1,haha2,haha3,haha4
test1,test2,test3,test4,[offline],test5
letter1,letter2,letter3,letter4
output1,output2,[offline],output3,output4
check1,[core],check2
num1,num2,num3,num4
I need to exclude all those lines that have "[ ]" and output them to another file without all those lines that have "[ ]".
I'm currently using this command:
grep ",[" loaded.txt | wc -l > newloaded.txt
But it's giving me an error:
grep: Invalid regular expression
Use grep -F to treat the search pattern as a fixed string. You could also replace wc -l with grep -c.
grep -cF ",[" loaded.txt > newloaded.txt
If you're curious, [ is a special character. If you don't use -F then you'll need to escape it with a backslash.
grep -c ",\[" loaded.txt > newloaded.txt
By the way, I'm not sure why you're using wc -l anyways...? From your problem description, it sounds like grep -v might be more appropriate. -v inverts grep's normal output, printing lines that don't match.
grep -vF ",[" loaded.txt > newloaded.txt
An alternative method to Grep
It's unclear if you want to remove lines that might contain either bracket [], or only the ones where the brackets specifically surround characters. Regardless of which method you intend to use, sed can easily remove lines that fit a definitive pattern:
To delete only lines that contained both brackets surrounding characters [...]:
sed '/\[.*\]/d' loaded.txt > newloaded.txt
Another approach might be to remove any line that contained either bracket:
sed '/\[/d;/\]/d' loaded.txt > newloaded.txt
(eg. lines containing either [ or ] would be deleted)
Your grep command doesn't seem to be excluding anything. Also, why are you using wc? I thought you want the lines, not their count.
So if you just want the lines, as you say, that don't have [], then this should work:
grep -v "\[" loaded.txt > new.txt
You can also use awk for this:
awk -F\[ 'NF==1' file > newfile
cat newfile
haha1,haha2,haha3,haha4
letter1,letter2,letter3,letter4
num1,num2,num3,num4
Or this:
awk '!/\[/' file

Trying to use grep to find something, then output a different part of the line

Say for instance I'm searching a line that is like this:
Color asdf
and I use grep to find that line, like grep asdf file.txt
How would I then display Color? Learning linux is hard.
With the command line tool sed you can replace stings by using regular expressions:
echo "Color asdf" | sed 's/\([^ ]*\).*/\1/'
This part: \([^ ]*\).* is a regular expresion. The first part of the regex: [^ ]*, matches any character except a space as many times as possible and what's between the \( and \) is being captured in the variable \1. Then you also match the remaining part of the string with .* and replace all of that with only the first word which was captured by \([^ ]*\) by using \1 in the replace part of the sed command.
Here some more info about sed:
http://linux.about.com/od/commands/a/Example-Uses-Of-Sed-Cmdsedxa.htm
You could use sed:
sed -n 's/[[:space:]][[:space:]]*asdf$//p' file.txt
Details:
The -n option tells sed not to print the pattern space automatically. Basically, it doesn't output anything unless you tell it to.
The s command of sed replaces text. Here, if a line ends with asdf, preceded by at least one whitespace character, we replace all of that with nothing and then print the line (notice the p flag at the end of the s command). The printing is only done if something was actually replaced. More information about the s command can be found e. g. in the GNU sed manual.
Edit for clarity: When using single quotes, parameter expansion does not work and thus, variables won't be replaced. To use variables, use double quotes:
search=asdf
sed -n "s/[[:space:]][[:space:]]*${search}\$//p" file.txt
If you'd really like to use grep here, you could pipe the output from grep into cut:
grep -h asdf *.txt | cut -s -d -f 1
Note that there have to be two spaces after the -d option to cut - the first tells cut to use a blank as the field delimiter (I'm assuming your fields are blank-delimited rather than tab-delimited), while the second separates the -d option from the following option (-f).
But, yeah, sed or awk are probably your friends here... :-)
you can color pattern in the line using grep
grep --colour -o 'asdf' file.txt
edit: the -o option will print only the patterns

clean letters and characters in files leaving only numbers using bash

I am reading files and i am doing something like:
cat file | sed s/\ //g |awk '$0 !~ /[^0-9]/'
With this line I want to clean anything different to numbers.
But i have a problem, when the file is not sorted the command works fine, but with a sorted file the command not works, the output is empty.
Who can help me?
with grep -o '[0-9]+' not works because:
I have a file like:
311435ll3e
kk13322;.
erre433
The output is:
311435
3
13322
433
And the 3 is in the second line, the output that i need is:
3114353
13322
433
As a general rule, there is no reason to have both awk and sed appearing in the same pipe, due to a large overlap of capability, and frequently the same is true of awk/grep/sed combinations.
If you just want to suppress the non-digit characters within lines of characters, use (eg) sed -e 's/[^0-9]//g' file, or if you want to do it in place with no backup, sed -i -e 's/[^0-9]//g' file, or in place with backup to a .bak file, sed -ibak -e 's/[^0-9]//g' file.
To suppress blank lines, you can append |egrep -v '^$' after the sed, but it's more efficient to just use sed's d command to delete the pattern space and start next cycle if the pattern space is empty. For example,
sed -e 's/[^0-9]//g; /^$/d' file
does a d if the line is empty after substitution.
The form suggested in 1_CR's comment,
sed -e 's/[^0-9]//g' -e '/./!d'
is an alternative. That form tests if the line has at least one character in it, and if so does not do a d.
If you want to suppress everything in the file that's not digits, use tr -cd 0-9 < file. This suppresses line feeds also.
Note, the form tr -cd [0-9] < file or tr -cd '[0-9]' < file is not correct; it will fail to suppress ] and [ characters because tr will regard them as part of SET1.

Text formating - sed, awk, shell

I need some assistance trying to build up a variable using a list of exclusions in a file.
So I have a exclude file I am using for rsync that looks like this:
*.log
*.out
*.csv
logs
shared
tracing
jdk*
8.6_Code
rpsupport
dbarchive
inarchive
comms
PR116PICL
**/lost+found*/
dlxwhsr*
regression
tmp
working
investigation
Investigation
dcsserver_weblogic_
dcswebrdtEAR_weblogic_
I need to build up a string to be used as a variable to feed into egrep -v, so that I can use the same exclusion list for rsync as I do when egrep -v from a find -ls.
So I have created this so far to remove all "*" and "/" - and then when it sees certain special characters it escapes them:
cat exclude-list.supt | while read line
do
echo $line | sed 's/\*//g' | sed 's/\///g' | 's/\([.-+_]\)/\\\1/g'
What I need the ouput too look like is this and then export that as a variable:
SEXCLUDE_supt="\.log|\.out|\.csv|logs|shared|PR116PICL|tracing|lost\+found|jdk|8\.6\_Code|rpsupport|dbarchive|inarchive|comms|dlxwhsr|regression|tmp|working|investigation|Investigation|dcsserver\_weblogic\_|dcswebrdtEAR\_weblogic\_"
Can anyone help?
A few issues with the following:
cat exclude-list.supt | while read line
do
echo $line | sed 's/\*//g' | sed 's/\///g' | 's/\([.-+_]\)/\\\1/g'
Sed reads files line by line so cat | while read line;do echo $line | sed is completely redundant also sed can do multiple substitutions by either passing them as a comma separated list or using the -e option so piping to sed three times is two too many. A problem with '[.-+_]' is the - is between . and + so it's interpreted as a range .-+ when using - inside a character class put it at the end beginning or end to lose this meaning like [._+-].
A much better way:
$ sed -e 's/[*/]//g' -e 's/\([._+-]\)/\\\1/g' file
\.log
\.out
\.csv
logs
shared
tracing
jdk
8\.6\_Code
rpsupport
dbarchive
inarchive
comms
PR116PICL
lost\+found
dlxwhsr
regression
tmp
working
investigation
Investigation
dcsserver\_weblogic\_
dcswebrdtEAR\_weblogic\_
Now we can pipe through tr '\n' '|' to replace the newlines with pipes for the alternation ready for egrep:
$ sed -e 's/[*/]//g' -e 's/\([._+-]\)/\\\1/g' file | tr "\n" "|"
\.log|\.out|\.csv|logs|shared|tracing|jdk|8\.6\_Code|rpsupport|dbarchive|...
$ EXCLUDE=$(sed -e 's/[*/]//g' -e 's/\([._+-]\)/\\\1/g' file | tr "\n" "|")
$ echo $EXCLUDE
\.log|\.out|\.csv|logs|shared|tracing|jdk|8\.6\_Code|rpsupport|dbarchive|...
Note: If your file ends with a newline character you will want to remove the final trailing |, try sed 's/\(.*\)|/\1/'.
This might work for you (GNU sed):
SEXCLUDE_supt=$(sed '1h;1!H;$!d;g;s/[*\/]//g;s/\([.-+_]\)/\\\1/g;s/\n/|/g' file)
This should work but I guess there are better solutions. First store everything in a bash array:
SEXCLUDE_supt=$( sed -e 's/\*//g' -e 's/\///g' -e 's/\([.-+_]\)/\\\1/g' exclude-list.supt)
and then process it again to substitute white space:
SEXCLUDE_supt=$(echo $SEXCLUDE_supt |sed 's/\s/|/g')

Remove blank lines with grep

I tried grep -v '^$' in Linux and that didn't work. This file came from a Windows file system.
Try the following:
grep -v -e '^$' foo.txt
The -e option allows regex patterns for matching.
The single quotes around ^$ makes it work for Cshell. Other shells will be happy with either single or double quotes.
UPDATE: This works for me for a file with blank lines or "all white space" (such as windows lines with \r\n style line endings), whereas the above only removes files with blank lines and unix style line endings:
grep -v -e '^[[:space:]]*$' foo.txt
Keep it simple.
grep . filename.txt
Use:
$ dos2unix file
$ grep -v "^$" file
Or just simply awk:
awk 'NF' file
If you don't have dos2unix, then you can use tools like tr:
tr -d '\r' < "$file" > t ; mv t "$file"
grep -v "^[[:space:]]*$"
The -v makes it print lines that do not completely match
===Each part explained===
^ match start of line
[[:space:]] match whitespace- spaces, tabs, carriage returns, etc.
* previous match (whitespace) may exist from 0 to infinite times
$ match end of line
Running the code-
$ echo "
> hello
>
> ok" |
> grep -v "^[[:space:]]*$"
hello
ok
To understand more about how/why this works, I recommend reading up on regular expressions. http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html
If you have sequences of multiple blank lines in a row, and would like only one blank line per sequence, try
grep -v "unwantedThing" foo.txt | cat -s
cat -s suppresses repeated empty output lines.
Your output would go from
match1
match2
to
match1
match2
The three blank lines in the original output would be compressed or "squeezed" into one blank line.
The same as the previous answers:
grep -v -e '^$' foo.txt
Here, grep -e means the extended version of grep. '^$' means that there isn't any character between ^(Start of line) and $(end of line). '^' and '$' are regex characters.
So the command grep -v will print all the lines that do not match this pattern (No characters between ^ and $).
This way, empty blank lines are eliminated.
I prefer using egrep, though in my test with a genuine file with blank line your approach worked fine (though without quotation marks in my test). This worked too:
egrep -v "^(\r?\n)?$" filename.txt
Do lines in the file have whitespace characters?
If so then
grep "\S" file.txt
Otherwise
grep . file.txt
Answer obtained from:
https://serverfault.com/a/688789
This code removes blank lines and lines that start with "#"
grep -v "^#" file.txt | grep -v ^[[:space:]]*$
awk 'NF' file-with-blank-lines > file-with-no-blank-lines
It's true that the use of grep -v -e '^$' can work, however it does not remove blank lines that have 1 or more spaces in them. I found the easiest and simplest answer for removing blank lines is the use of awk. The following is a modified a bit from the awk guys above:
awk 'NF' foo.txt
But since this question is for using grep I'm going to answer the following:
grep -v '^ *$' foo.txt
Note: the blank space between the ^ and *.
Or you can use the \s to represent blank space like this:
grep -v '^\s*$' foo.txt
I tried hard, but this seems to work (assuming \r is biting you here):
printf "\r" | egrep -xv "[[:space:]]*"
Using Perl:
perl -ne 'print if /\S/'
\S means match non-blank characters.
egrep -v "^\s\s+"
egrep already do regex, and the \s is white space.
The + duplicates current pattern.
The ^ is for the start
Use:
grep pattern filename.txt | uniq
Here is another way of removing the white lines and lines starting with the # sign. I think this is quite useful to read configuration files.
[root#localhost ~]# cat /etc/sudoers | egrep -v '^(#|$)'
Defaults requiretty
Defaults !visiblepw
Defaults always_set_home
Defaults env_reset
Defaults env_keep = "COLORS DISPLAY HOSTNAME HISTSIZE INPUTRC KDEDIR
LS_COLORS"
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL
stack ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
Read lines from file exclude EMPTY Lines
grep -v '^$' folderlist.txt
folderlist.txt
folder1/test
folder2
folder3
folder4/backup
folder5/backup
Results will be:
folder1/test
folder2
folder3
folder4/backup
folder5/backup

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