find string in file using bash - linux

Question

I need to find strings matching some regexp pattern and represent the search result as array for iterating through it with loop ), do I need to use sed ? In general I want to replace some strings but analyse them before replacing.

Answer 1

Using sed and diff:
sed -i.bak 's/this/that/' input
diff input input.bak
GNU sed will create a backup file before substitutions, and diff will show you those changes. However, if you are not using GNU sed:
mv input input.bak
sed 's/this/that/' input.bak > input
diff input input.bak
Another method using grep:
pattern="/X"
subst=that
while IFS='' read -r line; do
if [[ $line = *"$pattern"* ]]; then
echo "changing line: $line" 1>&2
echo "${line//$pattern/$subst}"
else
echo "$line"
fi
done < input > output

Answer 2

The best way to do this would be to use grep to get the lines, and populate an array with the result using newline as the internal field separator:
#!/bin/bash
# get just the desired lines
results=$(grep "mypattern" mysourcefile.txt)
# change the internal field separator to be a newline
IFS=$'/n'
# populate an array from the result lines
lines=($results)
# return the third result
echo "${lines[2]}"
You could build a loop to iterate through the results of the array, but a more traditional and simple solution would just be to use bash's iteration:
for line in $lines; do
echo "$line"
done

Answer 3

FYI: Here is a similar concept I created for fun. I thought it would be good to show how to loop a file and such with this. This is a script where I look at a Linux sudoers file check that it contains one of the valid words in my valid_words array list. Of course it ignores the comment "#" and blank "" lines with sed. In this example, we would probably want to just print the Invalid lines only but this script prints both.
#!/bin/bash
# -- Inspect a sudoer file, look for valid and invalid lines.
file="${1}"
declare -a valid_words=( _Alias = Defaults includedir )
actual_lines=$(cat "${file}" | wc -l)
functional_lines=$(cat "${file}" | sed '/^\s*#/d;/^\s*$/d' | wc -l)
while read line ;do
# -- set the line to nothing "" if it has a comment or is empty line.
line="$(echo "${line}" | sed '/^\s*#/d;/^\s*$/d')"
# -- if not set to nothing "", check if the line is valid from our list of valid words.
if ! [[ -z "$line" ]] ;then
unset found
for each in "${valid_words[#]}" ;do
found="$(echo "$line" | egrep -i "$each")"
[[ -z "$found" ]] || break;
done
[[ -z "$found" ]] && { echo "Invalid=$line"; sleep 3; } || echo "Valid=$found"
fi
done < "${file}"
echo "actual lines: $actual_lines funtional lines: $functional_lines"