I know that this is quite an easy thing for any advanced Vim programmer, but I have been trying to find a solution for a couple of hours now.
In my results file, there are certain lines like:
/Users/name/Project/Task1/folder1 : INFO : Random Info message
Here, /Users/name/Project/Task1/folder1 is my pwd i.e present working directory.
I want to replace all the occurrences of my pwd above in the file with 'USER'. How can I do that?
:%s#/Users/name/Project/Task1/folder1#USER#g
or
:%s#<C-r>=getcwd()<CR>#USER#g
If I understand you correctly you can simply use the search and replace functionality and escape the / character like this:
:%s/\/Users\/name\/Project\/Task1\/folder1/USER/
If you need to replace multiple current working directories (and thus want to have the pwd to be dynamic) it is probably easier to use something like sed:
sed "s~$(pwd)~USER~" < file
Note that the ~ is used as a delimiter for the command instead of the /, this way we do not need to escape the / in the path.
Related
I have found a simple solution to my actual requirement, but I would still like to understand how to use the regex equivalent of the single character wildcard ? which we use for filtering ... in say ls
I would like to rename a group of files which differ by one character.
FROM
Impossible-S01E01-x264.mkv
Impossible-S01E02-x264.mkv
Impossible-S01E03-x264.mkv
Impossible-S01E04-x264.mkv
Impossible-S01E05-x264.mkv
TO
Impossible-S01E01.mkv
Impossible-S01E02.mkv
Impossible-S01E03.mkv
Impossible-S01E04.mkv
Impossible-S01E05.mkv
As I said above, my simple solution is:
rename s/-x264// *.mkv
That sorts out my needs - all good and well - but I really want to understand my first approach:
To list the files, I can use:
ls Impossible-S01E0?-x264.mkv
So what I was trying for the rename was:
rename s/Impossible-S01E0?-x264.mkv/Impossible-S01E0?.mkv/ *.mkv
I have read up here:
How do regular expressions differ from wildcards used to filter files
And here:
Why does my regular expression work in X but not in Y?
I see this:
. matches any character (or any character except a newline).
I just can't seem to wrap my head around how to use that - hoping someone will explain for my education.
{ edit: missed a backslash \ }
So, regular expressions aren't globs. If you wanted to keep the middle (e.g. catch the season/ep) and replace everything else, you'd need to use capture groups. e.g. s/^.*(S\d+E\d+).*\.(.*?)$/Foo-$1.$2/
This would extract an SxxExx and the file extension, throw everything else away, and compose a new filename.
In a bit more detail it:
Matches everything from the start until an SxxExx (where xx is actually any number of digits)
Captures the contents of SxxExx
Matches everything until the final literal .
Non-greedily matches everything after the ., which it captures.
For your specific case of removing a suffix, this is likely overkill, though.
In my problem statement I would like to replace a word with a prefix
sed 's/hello-world/'"$1"'-hello-world/g' test.sql
Here $1 is any prefix passed as parameter to the shell script
In this case in the first go it works absolutely fine.
Let's assume "prefix=new"
It replaces as new-hello-world which is a perfect output.
If i re-run the command again I get new-new-hello-world which is not intended
Run it again i would get new-new-new-hello-world which is not intended
How can we search and replace it as new-hello-world no matter how many times it is run? Using a regex is also fine.
To make it idempotent, just check first that it doesn't already match. eg:
sed "/$1-hello-world/!s/hello-world/$1-hello-world/g" test.sql
This is not particularly robust, and will fail if the original documents contains the line new-hello-world hello-world, but is probably sufficient for your needs. (You need to worry more about / characters in the prefix, so if you want a robust solution there's a fair bit of work to be done.)
I have a folder that was created automatically. The user unintentionally provided smart (curly) quotes as part of the name, and the process that sanitizes the inputs did not catch these. As a result, the folder name contains the smart quotes. For example:
this-is-my-folder’s-name-“Bob”
I'm now trying to rename/remove said folder on the command line, and none of the standard tricks for dealing with files/folders with special characters (enclosing in quotes, escaping the characters, trying to rename it by inode, etc.) are working. All result in:
mv: cannot move this-is-my-folder’s-name-“Bob” to this-is-my-folders-name-BOB: No such file or directory
Can anyone provide some advice as to how I can achieve this?
To get the name in a format you can copy-and-paste into your shell:
printf '%q\n' this*
...will print out the filename in a manner the shell will accept as valid input. This might look something like:
$'this-is-my-folder200\231s-name-200\234Bob200\235'
...which you can then use as an argument to mv:
mv $'this-is-my-folder200\231s-name-200\234Bob200\235' this-is-my-folders-name-BOB
Incidentally, if your operating system works the same way mine does (when running the test above), this would explain why using single-character globs such as ? for those characters didn't work: They're actually more than one byte long each!
You can use shell globbing token ? to match any single character, so matching the smart quotes using ? should do:
mv this-is-my-folder?s-name-?Bob? new_name
Here replacing the smart quotes with ? to match the file name.
There are several possibilities.
If an initial substring of the file name ending before the first quote is unique within the directory, then you can use filename completion to help you type an appropriate command. Type "mv" (without the quotes) and the unique initial substring, then press the TAB key to request filename completion. Bash will complete the filename with the correct characters, correctly escaped.
Use a graphical file browser. Then you can select the file to rename by clicking on it. (Details of how to proceed from there depend on the browser.) If you don't have a graphical terminal and can't get one, then you may be able to do the same with a text-mode browser such as Midnight Commander.
A simple glob built with the ? or * wildcard should be able to match the filename
Use a more complex glob to select the filename, and perhaps others with the same problem. Maybe something like *[^a-zA-Z0-9-]* would do. Use a pattern substitution to assign a new name. Something like this:
for f in *[^a-zA-Z0-9-]*; do
mv "$f" "${f//[^a-zA-Z0-9-]/}"
done
The substitution replaces all appearances of a characters that are not decimal digits, appercase or lowercase Latin letters, or hyphens with nothing (i.e. it strips them). Do take care before you use this, though, to make sure you're not going to make more changes than you intend to do.
I am trying to run this command in vi
:s/href="\//href="http:\/\/website.com\/folder\/subfolder\//g
but got this error E486: Pattern not found: href="\/
What am i doing wrong?
That error means pretty much what it says. vi didn't find any pattern href="/ (ignoring escapes) in your file.
Sometimes it's easier to use something besides / for the search delimiter if your search has a lot of slashes, so you don't need to escape them all. Try replacing the / delimiter with # instead, like this:
s#href="/#href="http://website.com/folder/subfolder/#g
Then maybe you can more easily see what's wrong with your pattern:
becouse there are many '/' chars, try use another delimiter, ex ',':
:s,some/pattern/with/slashes,new/string,g
On another note. That substition worked for me. Just copied and pasted. Are you on the same line that you are trying to perform the substitution on? the 'g' is meant globally on the line you are on. If you need to perform the search and replace on the file the use :%s/
I need to find all *.xml files that matched by pattern on Linux. I need to have written the file name on the screen and then change the pattern in the file just was found.
For instance.
I can start the script with arguments for keyword and for value, i.e
script.sh keyword "another word"
Script should find all files with keyword and do the following changes in the files containing keyword.
<keyword></keyword> should be the same <keyword></keyword>
<keyword>some word</keyword> should be like this <keyword>some word, another word</keyword>
In other words if initially value in keyword node was empty, then I don't need to change it and if it contains some value then I need to extend it with the value I will specify.
What is best way to do this on Linux? Using find, grep, sed?
Performance is also important since the number of files are thousands.
Thank you.
It seems using a combination of find, grep and sed would do this and they are pretty fast since you'll be doing text processing so there might not be a need for xml processing but if you could you give an example or rephrase your question I might be able to provide more help.