I'm pretty new to vim, and I'm having a hard time understanding some subtleties with vim scripting. Specifically, I'm having trouble working with commands that expect an unquoted-string (is there a name for this?). For example
cd some/unquoted/string/path
The problem is that I'd like to pass a variable, but calling
let pathname = 'some/path'
cd pathname
will try to change the current directory to 'pathname' instead of 'some/path'. One way around this is to use
let cmd = 'cd ' . pathname
execute cmd
but this seems a bit roundabout. This StackOverflow question actually uses cd with a variable, but it doesn't work on my system ("a:path" is treated as the path as described above).
I'm using cd as a specific example, but this behavior isn't unique to cd; for example, the edit command also behaves this way. (Is there a name for this type of command?)
TL;DR: use execute 'cd' fnameescape(pathname)
Explanation: Lots of basic commands that take filenames as an argument support backtick syntax:
command `shell command`
or
command `=vim_expression`
so your example may be written as
cd `=pathname`
if you are running this in a controlled environment. You must not use this variant in plugins because a) there is &wildignore setting that may step in your way: set wildignore=*|cd =pathname will make cd fail regardless of what is stored in the pathname and b) if pathname contains newlines it will be split into two or more directories. Thus what you should use for any piece of code you intend to share is
execute 'cd' fnameescape(pathname)
Note that you must not use execute "cd" pathname because it does not care about special characters in pathname (for example, space).
The basic commands in Vim never do any processing of variables (how would it know that you didn't mean to change to the pathname directory instead of the some/path one?). You don't have to be quite as roundabout as you suggested, you can just do:
exe 'cd' pathname
Note that exe concatenates arguments with a space automatically, so you don't have to do:
exe 'cd ' . pathname
A lot time ago I wrote this plugin (function FixPathName() in order to solve this kind of issues. Now vim has some new functions like shellescape() when the path need to be used with external commands.
Related
I am trying to run a Bash command from within my Perl program.
However Perl seems to be confusing my Bash $PWD environment variable as a Perl variable.
How can I make it just read it all as a string?
This is what I'm trying to run
my $path = /first/path;
`ln -s $path $PWD/second/path`
Those backticks runs the second line in Bash. Using System() produces the same problem.
Any ideas?
There are two queries here, on use of Bash variables and on running external commands.
There is the %ENV hash in Perl, with environment variables
perl -wE'say $ENV{PWD}'
However, you are often better off getting the equivalent within the script, as things may have a subtly different meaning for the script or change as the script runs.
More importantly, using shell commands exposes you to all kinds of potential problems with quoting, shell injection, and interpretation. For instance, the command you show is dangerous, as outlined in Charles Duffy comment. It is in principle better to use Perl's rich functionality. See for example
Executing system commands safely while coding in Perl
Using system commands in Perl instead of built in
libraries/functions [duplicate]
for a sober, and detailed, account of advantages.
In case you do need to run external commands, it is best to avoid the shell altogether, for example by using the multi-argument form of system. If you need the output of the command as well there are various modules in Perl that provide that. See links below.
If you also need to use the shell's capabilities, instead of quoting everything just right in order for the shell to receive what it needs better use a ready tool like String::ShellQuote.
Some examples:
How to use both pipes and prevent shell expansion in perl system function?
Perl is respecting '<' as a regular character rather an output redirection
How to pipe the content of a variable as STDIN in a qx{} statement in Perl?
Perl system command with multiple parameters output to file.
Note that qx operator (backticks) uses /bin/sh, which may or may not get relegated to Bash. So if you want Bash you need system('/bin/bash', '-c', $cmd), where $cmd need be built carefully to avoid problems. See the links with examples.
Here is a full example related to the objective behind the question.
Your program's working directory may be other than expected depending on how it's started. For one, it changes after chdir. I don't know your exact intent with PWD, but in Perl there are core Cwd::cwd and FindBin with $RealBin, for the current working directory and for the directory where the script resides (generally different things).
To create a symbolic link to $path, with the relative path following the current working directory
use warnings;
use strict;
use Cwd qw(cwd);
my $cwd = cwd;
my $path = '/first/path';
symlink($path, "$cwd/second/path") or die "Can't make a symlink: $!";
If the path is meant to be the script's location use $RealBin from FindBin instead of cwd.
Note that with symlink you cannot pass a directory instead of a link name. See this page.
I have a utility function that I used a lot (assertReturnStatus()). I'd like to define it in a utility file (utility.sh) and reuse it in other bash scripts.
How can reuse the function from another bash script file? Thanks.
You need to "import" the first file in the second.
Be warned that this will litterally include the first, so any code in the first will be executed as if it were litterally in the place of the line.
The syntax is:
# if /path/to/file exists, then include it
[ -f /path/to/file ] && . /path/to/file
Note bash also support the keyword source (ie: source /path/to/file) but it is not POSIX compliant and might not work in other shell like ash, dash, posh.
If you don't want to do an explicit sourcing of your script file as bufh suggests: I put my often used functions in my .bashrc which gets always sourced thus having the functions always available.
As bufh pointed out in a comment always is not really always but limited to interactive shells. So, if you're planning to use the scripts from an interactive session, you could put it into the .bashrc, otherwise go for explicit sourcing.
I am trying to create a script that will run a program on each file in a list. I have been trying to do this using a .csh file (I have no clue if this is the best way), and I started with something as simple as hello world
echo "hello world"
The problem is that I cannot execute this script, or verify that it works correctly. (I was trying to do ./testscript.csh which is obviously wrong). I haven't been able to find anything that really explains how to run C Scripts, and I'm guessing there's a better way to do this too. What do I need to change to get this to work?
You need to mark it as executable; Unix doesn't execute things arbitrarily based on extension.
chmod +x testscript.csh
Also, I strongly recommend using sh or bash instead of csh, or you will soon learn about the idiosyncrasies of csh's looping and control flow constructs (some things only work inside them if done a particular way, in particular with the single-line versions things are very limited).
You can use ./testscript.csh. You will however need to make it executable first:
chmod u+x testscript.csh
Which means set testscript to have execute permissions for the user (who ever the file is owned by - which in this case should be yourself!)
Also to tell the OS that this is a csh script you will need put
#! /path/to/csh
on the first line (where /path/to/csh is the full path to csh on your system. You can find that out by issuing the command which csh).
That should give you the behvaiour you want.
EDIT As discussed in some of the comments, you may want to choose an alternative shell to C Shell (csh). It is not the friendliest one for scripting.
You have several options.
You can run the script from within your current shell. If you're running csh or tcsh, the syntax is source testscript.csh. If you're running sh, bash, ksh, etc., the syntax is . ./testscript.sh. Note that I've changed the file name suffix; source or . runs the commands in the named file in your current shell. If you have any shell-specific syntax, this won't work unless your interactive shell matches the one used by the script. If the script is very simple (just a sequence of simple commands), that might not matter.
You can make the script an executable program. (I'm going to repeat some of what others have already written.) Add a "shebang" as the first line. For a csh script, use #!/bin/csh -f. The -f avoids running commands in your own personal startup scripts (.cshrc et al), which saves time and makes it more likely that others will be able to use it. Or, for a sh script (recommended), used #!/bin/sh (no -f, it has a completely different meaning). In either case, run chmod +x the_script, then ./the_script.
There's a trick I often use when I want to perform some moderately complex action. Say I want to delete some, but not all, files in the current directory, but the criterion can't be expressed conveniently in a single command. I might run ls > tmp.sh, then edit tmp.h with my favorite editor (mine happens to be vim). Then I go through the list of files and delete all the ones that I want to leave alone. Once I've done that, I can replace each file name with a command to remove it; in vim, :%s/.*/rm -f &/. I add a #!/bin/sh at the top save it, chmod +x foo.sh, then ./foo.sh. (If some of the file names might have special characters, I can use :%s/.*/rm -f '&'/.)
i am novice to the Linux shell and had to recently start using it for work...i have now got used to the basic commands in bash to find my way around...however there are a lot of commands i find myself typing over and over again and its kind of a hassle to type them every time...so can anyone tell me how can i shorten the command syntax for ones i use frequently.
A very simple example, i use the ls -lh command often, though this is quite short but im just giving an example. Can I have something (a shell script may be) so that I can run it by typing just say lh.
I want to do it for more complex commands.
alias lh='ls -lh'
If you want to make this persistent across sessions, put it in your .bashrc file. Don't forget to run source .bashrc afterwards to make bash aware of the changes.
If you want to pass variables, an alias just isn't enough. You can make a function. As an example, consider the command lsall to list everything in a given directory (note this is just an example and thus very error prone):
function lsall
{
ls $1/*
}
$Ngets replaced with the Nth argument.
You would place the following alias in your .bashrc file:
alias lh='ls -lh'
Now lh is shorthand for ls -lh.
For more complicated tasks you could use a bash function. For example, on one of my machines I have a function which causes 'ls' to run after every successful 'cd':
cdls() {
builtin cd "$*" && ls
}
alias cd='cdls'
you can define aliases. For longer commands, use a function, put it into a library file and source it whenever you want to use your functions.
Just for the sake of completeness, since you want to learn bash: you could also write a function
lh() {
ls -lh "$#"
}
although I would never write that when a simple alias would do ;-)
;) Heh, I remember one problem when I was starting out on Linux, which is that I would ask questions like these, and people would diligently answer them, but no one would explain how to make such changes permanent, and so I found myself typing in a bunch of commands every time I opened a terminal.
So, even though others have accurately answered this question... if you want to make the change permanent, put the alias-line into your ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc file (~ = your home directory). It depends a bit on your distribution on which is run when, but I always try adding my aliases to ~/.profile first and if that doesn't work, then ~/.bashrc. One of them should work for sure.
This question already has answers here:
Multiple commands in an alias for bash
(10 answers)
Closed 4 years ago.
I know how to configure aliases in bash, but is there a way to configure an alias for a sequence of commands?
I.e say I want one command to change to a particular directory, then run another command.
In addition, is there a way to setup a command that runs "sudo mycommand", then enters the password? In the MS-DOS days I'd be looking for a .bat file but I'm unsure of the linux (or in this case Mac OSX) equivalent.
For chaining a sequence of commands, try this:
alias x='command1;command2;command3;'
Or you can do this:
alias x='command1 && command2 && command3'
The && makes it only execute subsequent commands if the previous returns successful.
Also for entering passwords interactively, or interfacing with other programs like that, check out expect. (http://expect.nist.gov/)
You mention BAT files so perhaps what you want is to write a shell script. If so then just enter the commands you want line-by-line into a file like so:
command1
command2
and ask bash to execute the file:
bash myscript.sh
If you want to be able to invoke the script directly without typing "bash" then add the following line as the first line of the file:
#! /bin/bash
command1
command2
Then mark the file as executable:
chmod 755 myscript.sh
Now you can run it just like any other executable:
./myscript.sh
Note that unix doesn't really care about file extensions. You can simply name the file "myscript" without the ".sh" extension if you like. It's that special first line that is important. For example, if you want to write your script in the Perl programming language instead of bash the first line would be:
#! /usr/bin/perl
That first line tells your shell what interpreter to invoke to execute your script.
Also, if you now copy your script into one of the directories listed in the $PATH environment variable then you can call it from anywhere by simply typing its file name:
myscript.sh
Even tab-completion works. Which is why I usually include a ~/bin directory in my $PATH so that I can easily install personal scripts. And best of all, once you have a bunch of personal scripts that you are used to having you can easily port them to any new unix machine by copying your personal ~/bin directory.
it's probably easier to define functions for these types of things than aliases, keeps things more readable if you want to do more than a command or two:
In your .bashrc
perform_my_command() {
pushd /some_dir
my_command "$#"
popd
}
Then on the command line you can simply do:
perform_my_command my_parameter my_other_parameter "my quoted parameter"
You could do anything you like in a function, call other functions, etc.
You may want to have a look at the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide for in depth knowledge.
For the alias you can use this:
alias sequence='command1 -args; command2 -args;'
or if the second command must be executed only if the first one succeeds use:
alias sequence='command1 -args && command2 -args'
Your best bet is probably a shell function instead of an alias if the logic becomes more complex or if you need to add parameters (though bash supports aliases parameters).
This function can be defined in your .profile or .bashrc. The subshell is to avoid changing your working directory.
function myfunc {
( cd /tmp; command )
}
then from your command prompt
$ myfunc
For your second question you can just add your command to /etc/sudoers (if you are completely sure of what you are doing)
myuser ALL = NOPASSWD: \
/bin/mycommand
Apropos multiple commands in a single alias, you can use one of the logical operators to combine them. Here's one to switch to a directory and do an ls on it
alias x="cd /tmp && ls -al"
Another option is to use a shell function. These are sh/zsh/bash commands. I don't know enough of other shells to be sure if they work.
As for the sudo thing, if you want that (although I don't think it's a good idea), the right way to go is to alter the /etc/sudoers file to get what you want.
You can embed the function declaration followed by the function in the alias itself, like so:
alias my_alias='f() { do_stuff_with "$#" (arguments)" ...; }; f'
The benefit of this approach over just declaring the function by itself is that you can have a peace of mind that your function is not going to be overriden by some other script you're sourcing (or using .), which might use its own helper under the same name.
E.g., Suppose you have a script init-my-workspace.sh that you're calling like . init-my-workspace.sh or source init-my-workspace.sh whose purpose is to set or export a bunch of environment variables (e.g., JAVA_HOME, PYTHON_PATH etc.). If you happen to have a function my_alias inside there, as well, then you're out of luck as the latest function declaration withing the same shell instance wins.
Conversely, aliases have separate namespace and even in case of name clash, they are looked up first. Therefore, for customization relevant to interactive usage, you should only ever use aliases.
Finally, note that the practice of putting all the aliases in the same place (e.g., ~/.bash_aliases) enables you to easily spot any name clashes.
you can also write a shell function; example for " cd " and "ls " combo here