Sed replace date - linux

So, I have looked over other questions and nothing specific seems like it can help me. I have a file that has a date variable set like mm/dd/yyyy that I would like to replace the date with.
For example:
version.js
//Application Version Information
app_date="7/07/2015";
...
And I would like to use sed to replace it. I actually have a shell script that replaces many things in this file, and all work except for the date. Currently what I'm trying is:
sed -i -e 's:app_date="[0-9][0-9]/[0-9][0-9]/[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]":app_date="$(date %m/%d/%Y)":g'
But this isn't getting me the results I want. I've also tried:
sed -ibak 's/app_date=\"[0-9][0-9]\/[0-9][0-9]\/[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]\"/app_date=\$(date +%m/%d/$Y)\"/g'
Neither seem to work.
Any ideas?
Edited to add:
The solution I've successfully employed is Sean Bright's with double quotes:
sed -i -e "s:app_date=".*";:app_date="$(date +%m/%d/%Y)";:g" version.js
This works perfectly for my needs.

I bet your script would work if the date you were matching was October 10th...
sed -i -e 's:app_date="[0-9][0-9]*/[0-9][0-9]*/[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]":app_date="$(date %m/%d/%Y)":g'
Add the *s after your day and month expressions as above. [0-9][0-9] will not match 7.
Now that I think about it, because you don't care about the date that is already in the file, most of this is unnecessary, you can simply do:
sed -i -e 's:app_date=".*";:app_date="'$(date +%m/%d/%Y)'";:g' version.js

You're using the wrong shell quotes. the command substitution $() will not be expanded inside single quotes.
sed -i "/^app_date=/capp_date=\"$(date +%m/%d/%Y)\";" version.js # GNU only
Another approach, using a file editor instead of a stream editor:
ed -s version.js << EOF
/^app_date=/c
app_date="$(date +%m/%d/%Y)";
.
w
EOF

For replacing date with anything in Linux
n=`date +%d`
cal>temp
If [$n -lt 10]
//10 is just a predction for condition
then
Sed s/"$n"/*/g temp
else
Sed s/"$n"/**/g temp
fi
// s is text substituting option
//* is anything that replaces the date
// g is global replacement

Related

sed not working on a variable within a bash script; requesting a file. Simple example

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[#]}"

How to substitute two lines in same text files [duplicate]

What's the simplest way to do a find and replace for a given input string, say abc, and replace with another string, say XYZ in file /tmp/file.txt?
I am writting an app and using IronPython to execute commands through SSH — but I don't know Unix that well and don't know what to look for.
I have heard that Bash, apart from being a command line interface, can be a very powerful scripting language. So, if this is true, I assume you can perform actions like these.
Can I do it with bash, and what's the simplest (one line) script to achieve my goal?
The easiest way is to use sed (or perl):
sed -i -e 's/abc/XYZ/g' /tmp/file.txt
Which will invoke sed to do an in-place edit due to the -i option. This can be called from bash.
If you really really want to use just bash, then the following can work:
while IFS='' read -r a; do
echo "${a//abc/XYZ}"
done < /tmp/file.txt > /tmp/file.txt.t
mv /tmp/file.txt{.t,}
This loops over each line, doing a substitution, and writing to a temporary file (don't want to clobber the input). The move at the end just moves temporary to the original name. (For robustness and security, the temporary file name should not be static or predictable, but let's not go there.)
For Mac users:
sed -i '' 's/abc/XYZ/g' /tmp/file.txt
(See the comment below why)
File manipulation isn't normally done by Bash, but by programs invoked by Bash, e.g.:
perl -pi -e 's/abc/XYZ/g' /tmp/file.txt
The -i flag tells it to do an in-place replacement.
See man perlrun for more details, including how to take a backup of the original file.
I was surprised when I stumbled over this...
There is a replace command which ships with the "mysql-server" package, so if you have installed it try it out:
# replace string abc to XYZ in files
replace "abc" "XYZ" -- file.txt file2.txt file3.txt
# or pipe an echo to replace
echo "abcdef" |replace "abc" "XYZ"
See man replace for more on this.
This is an old post but for anyone wanting to use variables as #centurian said the single quotes mean nothing will be expanded.
A simple way to get variables in is to do string concatenation since this is done by juxtaposition in bash the following should work:
sed -i -e "s/$var1/$var2/g" /tmp/file.txt
Bash, like other shells, is just a tool for coordinating other commands. Typically you would try to use standard UNIX commands, but you can of course use Bash to invoke anything, including your own compiled programs, other shell scripts, Python and Perl scripts etc.
In this case, there are a couple of ways to do it.
If you want to read a file, and write it to another file, doing search/replace as you go, use sed:
sed 's/abc/XYZ/g' <infile >outfile
If you want to edit the file in place (as if opening the file in an editor, editing it, then saving it) supply instructions to the line editor 'ex'
echo "%s/abc/XYZ/g
w
q
" | ex file
Example is like vi without the fullscreen mode. You can give it the same commands you would at vi's : prompt.
I found this thread among others and I agree it contains the most complete answers so I'm adding mine too:
sed and ed are so useful...by hand.
Look at this code from #Johnny:
sed -i -e 's/abc/XYZ/g' /tmp/file.txt
When my restriction is to use it in a shell script, no variable can be used inside in place of "abc" or "XYZ". The BashFAQ seems to agree with what I understand at least. So, I can't use:
x='abc'
y='XYZ'
sed -i -e 's/$x/$y/g' /tmp/file.txt
#or,
sed -i -e "s/$x/$y/g" /tmp/file.txt
but, what can we do? As, #Johnny said use a while read... but, unfortunately that's not the end of the story. The following worked well with me:
#edit user's virtual domain
result=
#if nullglob is set then, unset it temporarily
is_nullglob=$( shopt -s | egrep -i '*nullglob' )
if [[ is_nullglob ]]; then
shopt -u nullglob
fi
while IFS= read -r line; do
line="${line//'<servername>'/$server}"
line="${line//'<serveralias>'/$alias}"
line="${line//'<user>'/$user}"
line="${line//'<group>'/$group}"
result="$result""$line"'\n'
done < $tmp
echo -e $result > $tmp
#if nullglob was set then, re-enable it
if [[ is_nullglob ]]; then
shopt -s nullglob
fi
#move user's virtual domain to Apache 2 domain directory
......
As one can see if nullglob is set then, it behaves strangely when there is a string containing a * as in:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.example.com
which becomes
<VirtualHost ServerName www.example.com
there is no ending angle bracket and Apache2 can't even load.
This kind of parsing should be slower than one-hit search and replace but, as you already saw, there are four variables for four different search patterns working out of one parse cycle.
The most suitable solution I can think of with the given assumptions of the problem.
You can use sed:
sed -i 's/abc/XYZ/gi' /tmp/file.txt
You can use find and sed if you don't know your filename:
find ./ -type f -exec sed -i 's/abc/XYZ/gi' {} \;
Find and replace in all Python files:
find ./ -iname "*.py" -type f -exec sed -i 's/abc/XYZ/gi' {} \;
Be careful if you replace URLs with "/" character.
An example of how to do it:
sed -i "s%http://domain.com%http://www.domain.com/folder/%g" "test.txt"
Extracted from: http://www.sysadmit.com/2015/07/linux-reemplazar-texto-en-archivos-con-sed.html
If the file you are working on is not so big, and temporarily storing it in a variable is no problem, then you can use Bash string substitution on the whole file at once - there's no need to go over it line by line:
file_contents=$(</tmp/file.txt)
echo "${file_contents//abc/XYZ}" > /tmp/file.txt
The whole file contents will be treated as one long string, including linebreaks.
XYZ can be a variable eg $replacement, and one advantage of not using sed here is that you need not be concerned that the search or replace string might contain the sed pattern delimiter character (usually, but not necessarily, /). A disadvantage is not being able to use regular expressions or any of sed's more sophisticated operations.
You may also use the ed command to do in-file search and replace:
# delete all lines matching foobar
ed -s test.txt <<< $'g/foobar/d\nw'
See more in "Editing files via scripts with ed".
To edit text in the file non-interactively, you need in-place text editor such as vim.
Here is simple example how to use it from the command line:
vim -esnc '%s/foo/bar/g|:wq' file.txt
This is equivalent to #slim answer of ex editor which is basically the same thing.
Here are few ex practical examples.
Replacing text foo with bar in the file:
ex -s +%s/foo/bar/ge -cwq file.txt
Removing trailing whitespaces for multiple files:
ex +'bufdo!%s/\s\+$//e' -cxa *.txt
Troubleshooting (when terminal is stuck):
Add -V1 param to show verbose messages.
Force quit by: -cwq!.
See also:
How to edit files non-interactively (e.g. in pipeline)? at Vi SE
Try the following shell command:
find ./ -type f -name "file*.txt" | xargs sed -i -e 's/abc/xyz/g'
You can use python within the bash script too. I didn't have much success with some of the top answers here, and found this to work without the need for loops:
#!/bin/bash
python
filetosearch = '/home/ubuntu/ip_table.txt'
texttoreplace = 'tcp443'
texttoinsert = 'udp1194'
s = open(filetosearch).read()
s = s.replace(texttoreplace, texttoinsert)
f = open(filetosearch, 'w')
f.write(s)
f.close()
quit()
Simplest way to replace multiple text in a file using sed command
Command -
sed -i 's#a/b/c#D/E#g;s#/x/y/z#D:/X#g;' filename
In the above command s#a/b/c#D/E#g where I am replacing a/b/c with D/E and then after the ; we again doing the same thing
You can use rpl command. For example you want to change domain name in whole php project.
rpl -ivRpd -x'.php' 'old.domain.name' 'new.domain.name' ./path_to_your_project_folder/
This is not clear bash of cause, but it's a very quick and usefull. :)
For MAC users in case you don't read the comments :)
As mentioned by #Austin, if you get the Invalid command code error
For the in-place replacements BSD sed requires a file extension after the -i flag to save to a backup file with given extension.
sed -i '.bak' 's/find/replace' /file.txt
You can use '' empty string if you want to skip backup.
sed -i '' 's/find/replace' /file.txt
All merit to #Austin
Open file using vim editor. In command mode
:%s/abc/xyz/g
This is the simplest
In case of doing changes in multiple files together we can do in a single line as:-
user_name='whoami'
for file in file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt; do sed -i -e 's/default_user/${user_name}/g' $file; done
Added if in case could be useful.

I am having trouble with Sed

I am trying to use the sed command to replace this line:
charmm.c36a4.20140107.newcali4.fixhcali.grange.b
with:
charmm.20140911.c36a4.3rd.ghost2.model3rd
When I use:
sed -i '/s/firstline/secondline/g'
It doesn't work. I think the periods are messing it up. How do I get around this?
sed uses regular expressions, so . matches any character. If you want to only match the . character itself, tell sed to look for \.
so to change the first line into the second line:
sed -e 's/charmm\.c36a4.20140107\.newcali4\.fixhcali\.grange\.b/charmm.20140911.c36a4.3rd.ghost2.model3rd/g' < filetochange >newfile
Here, I added "g" so it does it globally, ie, if there are several instances on the same line, all will be changed. If you remove the "g", it will only change the first occurence on each line.
It reads from filetochange and writes to newfile
If you do :
sed -i -e 's/charmm\.c36a4.20140107\.newcali4\.fixhcali\.grange\.b/charmm.20140911.c36a4.3rd.ghost2.model3rd/g' filetochange
it will directly do the change in "filetochange" ... but please be careful, a badly written sed -i could mess up the file and make it unusable
The s command follows this syntax:
s/pattern/replacement/
You need to drop the / in front of the sed command.

Bash Scripting: Replace (or delete) string in a file if line starts with (or matches) another string

Assuming an ini-style file like this,
[Group]
Icon=xxx.ico
Title=An Image Editor
Description=Manipulates .ico, .png and .jpeg images
I want to replace/delete ".ico" ONLY in the line that starts with (or matches) "Icon="
I was trying this:
oldline="`cat "$file" | grep "Icon="`"
newline="`echo "$oldline" | tr ".ico" ".png"`"
cat "$oldfile" | tr "$oldline" "$newline" > $file
Then i realized that tr works completely different than i thought. Its NOT a tradicional "replace this for that" function. So i guess the correct way is using sed. But:
Ive never used sedbefore. No idea how it works. Is it overkill?
If the most indicated way is really using sed, given it is so powerful, is there any elegant way to accomplish this rather than this "fetch line -> modify line -> replace oldline for newline in file" approach?
Notes:
I cant replace ".ico" globally, i know that would be a LOT easier, i must restrict the replace to the Icon line, otherwise the Description line would be changed too.
Im new to shell scripting in Linux, so im looking not only to the solution itself, but also for the "proper" way to do it. Elegant, easy to read, conventional, etc
Thanks in advance!
Edit:
Thank you guys! Here is the final script, as a reference:
#! /bin/bash
# Fix the following WARNING in ~/.xsession-errors
# gnome-session[2035]: EggSMClient-WARNING: Desktop file '/home/xxx/.config/autostart/skype.desktop' has malformed Icon key 'skype.png'(should not include extension)
file="$HOME/.config/autostart/skype.desktop"
if [ -f "$file" ] ; then
if `cat "$file" | grep "Icon=" | grep -q ".png"` ; then
sed -i.bak '/^Icon=/s/\.png$//' "$file"
cp "$file" "$PWD"
cp "${file}.bak" "$PWD"
else
echo "Nothing to fix! (maybe fixed already?)"
fi
else
echo "Skype not installed (yet...)"
fi
MUCH sleeker than my original! The only thing i regret is that sed backup does not preserve original file timestamp. But i can live with that.
And, for the record, yes, ive created this script to fix an actual "bug" in Skype packaging.
Something like the following in sed should do what you need. First we check if the line starts with Icon= and if it does then we run the s command (i.e. substitute).
sed -i '/^Icon=/s/\.ico$/.png/' file
Edit: The sed script above can also be written like this:
/^Icon=/ { # Only run the following block when this matches
s/\.ico$/.png/ # Substitute '.ico' at the end of the line with '.png'
}
See this page for more details on how to restrict when commands are run.
sed is pretty easy to deal with. Here's one way:
sed 's/^\(Icon=.*\)\.ico$/\1.png/'
By default, sed works on every line in the file one at a time. The 's/.../.../' will do a regular expression match on the first argument and replace it with the second argument. The \1 stands for everything that matched the first group, which is demarcated by the parenthesis. You have to escape the parens with \.
The above works as part of a pipeline, but you can add an '-i' flag, like this
sed -i 's/^\(Icon=.*\)\.ico$/\1.png/' input.txt
to have it replace the file input.txt in place. Don't add that until you have tested your sed script a little.

How to search and replace text in a file from a shell script?

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

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