This question already has answers here:
How to use sed to remove the last n lines of a file
(26 answers)
Closed 5 years ago.
I was wondering if someone could help me out.
Im writing a bash script and i want to delete the last 12 lines of a specific file.
I have had a look around and somehow come up with the following;
head -n -12 /var/lib/pgsql/9.6/data/pg_hba.conf | tee /var/lib/pgsql/9.6/data/pg_hba.conf >/dev/null
But this wipes the file completely.
All i want to do is permanently delete the last 12 lines of that file so i can overwrite it with my own rules.
Any help on where im going wrong?
There are a number of methods, depending on your exact situation. For small, well-formed files (say, less than 1M, with regular sized lines), you might use Vim in ex mode:
ex -snc '$-11,$d|x' smallish_file.txt
-s -> silent; this is batch processing, so no UI necessary (faster)
-n -> No need for an undo buffer here
-c -> the command list
'$-11,$d' -> Select the 11 lines from the end to the end (for a total of 12 lines) and delete them. Note the single quote so that the shell does not interpolate $d as a variable.
x -> "write and quit"
For a similar, perhaps more authentic throw-back to '69, the ed line-editor could do this for you:
ed -s smallish_file.txt <<< $'-11,$d\nwq'
Note the $ outside of the single quote, which is different from the ex command above.
If Vim/ex and Ed are scary, you could use sed with some shell help:
sed -i "$(($(wc -l < smallish_file.txt) - 11)),\$d" smallish_file.txt
-i -> inplace: write the change to the file
The line count less 11 for a total of 12 lines. Note the escaped dollar symbol ($) so the shell does not interpolate it.
But using the above methods will not be performant for larger files (say, more than a couple of megs). For larger files, use the intermediate/temporary file method, as the other answers have described. A sed approach:
tac some_file.txt | sed '1,12d' | tac > tmp && mv tmp some_file.txt
tac to reverse the line order
sed to remove the last (now first) 12 lines
tac to reverse back to the original order
More efficient than sed is a head approach:
head -n -12 larger_file.txt > tmp_file && mv tmp_file larger_file.txt
-n NUM show only the first NUM lines. Negated as we've done, shows up to the last NUM lines.
But for real efficiency -- perhaps for really large files or for where a temporary file would be unwarranted -- truncate the file in place. Unlike the other methods which involve variations of overwriting the entire old file with entire the new content, this one will be near instantaneous no matter the size of the file.
# In readable form:
BYTES=$(tail -12 really_large.txt | wc -c)
truncate -s -$BYTES really_large.txt
# Inline, perhaps as part of a script
truncate -s -$(tail -12 really_large.txt | wc -c) really_large.txt
The truncate command makes files exactly the specified size in bytes. If the file is too short, it will make it larger, and if the file is too large, it will chop off the excess really efficiently. It does this with filesystem semantics, so it involves writing usually no more than a couple of bytes. The magic here is in calculating where to chop:
-s -NUM -> Note the dash/negative; says to reduce the file by NUM bytes
$(tail -12 really_large.txt | wc -c) -> returns the number of bytes to be removed
So, you pays your moneys and takes your choices. Choose wisely!
Like this:
head -n -12 test.txt > tmp.txt && cp tmp.txt test.txt
You can use a temporary file store the intermediate result of head -n
I think the code below should work:
head -n -12 /var/lib/pgsql/9.6/data/pg_hba.conf > /tmp/tmp.pg.hba.$$ && mv /tmp/tmp.pg.hba.$$ /var/lib/pgsql/9.6/data/pg_hba.conf
If you are putting it a script, a more readable and easy to maintain code would be:
SRC_FILE=/var/lib/pgsql/9.6/data/pg_hba.conf
TMP_FILE=/tmp/tmp.pg.hba.$$
head -n -12 $SRC_FILE > $TMP_FILE && mv $TMP_FILE $SRC_FILE
I would suggest backing up /var/lib/pgsql/9.6/data/pg_hba.conf before running any script.
Simple and clear script
declare -i start
declare -i cnt
cat dummy
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
cnt=`wc -l dummy|awk '{print $1}'`
start=($cnt-12+1)
sed "${start},\$d" dummy
OUTPUT
is the first line
1
Related
I want to create 900 files with 3 letter names.
Example: xyz.txt, where x, y, and z are different letters from a to z.
I'm trying to do something like this:
for ((i=1; i < 900; i++))
do touch {a..z}{a..z}{a..z}$i.txt
done
I expect it to stop at 900.
But in the end I'm creating over 10K of files. Can someone please help me accomplish this?
To avoid any names with repeating characters before the period, as alluded to in comments, you could do this:
printf '%s.txt\n' {a..z}{a..z}{a..z} | grep -vE '(.).?\1.?\.' \
| head -n 900 | xargs touch
The printf statement prints the list from aaa.txt, aab.txt to zzz.txt.
grep -vE '(.).?\1.?\.' filters any names where the three characters before the period are not unique: aaa.txt, aab.txt, aba.txt and baa.txt are all filtered.
head -n 900 gets the first 900 names from the list
xargs touch calls touch as few times as possible but will make sure the command line never is too long.
If you want to randomize the file names (but still adhere to these criteria), you can shuffle them before selecting 900:
printf '%s.txt\n' {a..z}{a..z}{a..z} | grep -vE '(.).?\1.?\.' \
| shuf | head -n 900 | xargs touch
You can do this with 2 lines:
all=( {a..z}{a..z}{a..z}.txt )
touch "${all[#]:0:900}"
(assuming your OS allows a commandline with 900 arguments). If y ouwant something other than the first 900 such files, you'll need to do something more complicated.
The filenames remind the split default output naming. So you could split an empty file to 900 files.
split /dev/null -n900 -a3 --additional-suffix=".txt" ""
The following generates 910 names, and discards the last 10 before passing them to touch.
printf '%s.txt\n' {a..m}{p..v}{0..9} | head -n 900 | xargs touch
You might be able to find a combination which generates exactly 900 alternatives so you can just touch <pattern> and have the shell expand it to the required number of unique names.
Suppose I have these two files:
File 1:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
File 2:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Is it possible to use diff to compare these two files so that the result is equal ?
(Or if not, what are other tools should I use? )
Thanks
You could collapse whitespace so file2 looks like file1, with every number on the same line:
$ cat file1
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
$ cat file2
1
2
4
3
5
6
7
$ diff <(echo $(< file1)) <(echo $(< file2))
1c1
< 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
---
> 1 2 4 3 5 6 7
Explanation:
< file # Equivalent to "cat file", but slightly faster since the shell doesn't
# have to fork a new process.
$(< file) # Capture the output of the "< file" command. Can also be written
# with backticks, as in `< file`.
echo $(< file) # Echo each word from the file. This will have the side effect of
# collapsing all of the whitespace.
<(echo $(< file)) # An advanced way of piping the output of one command to another.
# The shell opens an unused file descriptor (say fd 42) and pipes
# the echo command to it. Then it passes the filename /dev/fd/42 to
# diff. The result is that you can pipe two different echo commands
# to diff.
Alternately, you may want to make file1 look like file2, with each number on separate lines. That will produce more useful diff output.
$ diff -u <(printf '%s\n' $(< file1)) <(printf '%s\n' $(< file2))
--- /dev/fd/63 2012-09-10 23:55:30.000000000 -0400
+++ file2 2012-09-10 23:47:24.000000000 -0400
## -1,7 +1,7 ##
1
2
-3
4
+3
5
6
7
This is similar to the first command with echo changed to printf '%s\n' to put a newline after each word.
Note: Both of these commands will fail if the files being diffed are overly long. This is because of the limit on command-line length. If that happens then you will need to workaround this limitation, say by storing the output of echo/printf to temporary files.
Some diffs have a -b (ignore blanks) and -w (ingnore whitespace), but as unix utilities are all line-oriented, I don't thing whitespace will include \n chars.
Dbl-check that your version of diff doesn't have some fancy gnu-options with diff --help | less or man diff.
Is your formatting correct above, file 1, data all on one line? You could force file2 to match that format with
awk '{printf"%s ", $0}' file2
Or as mentioned in comments, convert file 1
awk '{for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) printf("%s\n", $i)}' file1
But I'm guessing that your data isn't really that simple. Also there are likely line length limitations that will appear when you can least afford the time to deal with them.
Probably not what you want to hear, and diffing of complicated stuff like source-code is not an exact science. So, if you still need help, create a slightly more complicated testcase and add it to your question.
Finally, you'll need to show us what you'd expect the output of such a diff project to look like. Right now I can't see any meaningful way to display such differences for a non-trival case.
IHTH
If it turns out the data is indeed simple enough to not run into limitations, and the only difference between the files is that the first one separates by space and the second by newline, you can also do process substitution (as was suggested above) but with sed to replace the spaces in the first file with newlines:
diff <(sed 's/ /\n/g' file1) file2
Is there a (POSIX command line) way to print all of a file EXCEPT the last n lines? Use case being, I will have multiple files of unknown size, all of which contain a boilerplate footer of a known size, which I want to remove. I was wondering if there is already a utility that does this before writing it myself.
Most versions of head(1) - GNU derived, in particular, but not BSD derived - have a feature to do this. It will show the top of the file except the end if you use a negative number for the number of lines to print.
Like so:
head -n -10 textfile
Probably less efficient than the "wc" + "do the math" + "tail" method, but easier to look at:
tail -r file.txt | tail +NUM | tail -r
Where NUM is one more than the number of ending lines you want to remove, e.g. +11 will print all but the last 10 lines. This works on BSD which does not support the head -n -NUM syntax.
The head utility is your friend.
From the man page of head:
-n, --lines=[-]K
print the first K lines instead of the first 10;
with the leading `-', print all but the last K lines of each file
There's no standard commands to do that, but you can use awk or sed to fill a buffer of N lines, and print from the head once it's full. E.g. with awk:
awk -v n=5 '{if(NR>n) print a[NR%n]; a[NR%n]=$0}' file
cat <filename> | head -n -10 # Everything except last 10 lines of a file
cat <filename> | tail -n +10 # Everything except 1st 10 lines of a file
If the footer starts with a consistent line that doesn't appear elsewhere, you can use sed:
sed '/FIRST_LINE_OF_FOOTER/q' filename
That prints the first line of the footer; if you want to avoid that:
sed -n '/FIRST_LINE_OF_FOOTER/q;p' filename
This could be more robust than counting lines if the size of the footer changes in the future. (Or it could be less robust if the first line changes.)
Another option, if your system's head command doesn't support head -n -10, is to precompute the number of lines you want to show. The following depends on bash-specific syntax:
lines=$(wc -l < filename) ; (( lines -= 10 )) ; head -$lines filename
Note that the head -NUMBER syntax is supported by some versions of head for backward compatibility; POSIX only permits the head -n NUMBER form. POSIX also only permits the argument to -n to be a positive decimal integer; head -n 0 isn't necessarily a no-op.
A POSIX-compliant solution is:
lines=$(wc -l < filename) ; lines=$(($lines - 10)) ; head -n $lines filename
If you need to deal with ancient pre-POSIX shells, you might consider this:
lines=`wc -l < filename` ; lines=`expr $lines - 10` ; head -n $lines filename
Any of these might do odd things if a file is 10 or fewer lines long.
tac file.txt | tail +[n+1] | tac
This answer is similar to user9645's, but it avoids the tail -r command, which is also not a valid option many systems. See, e.g., https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1346596&s=4246c451162feff4e519ef2f5cb1a45f&p=8444785#post8444785 for an example.
Note that the +1 (in the brackets) was needed on the system I tried it on to test, but it may not be required on your system. So, to remove the last line, I had to put 2 in the brackets. This is probably related to the fact that you need to have the last line ending with regular line feed character(s). This, arguably, makes the last line a blank line. If you don't do that, then the tac command will combine the last two lines, so removing the "last" line (or the first to the tail command) will actually remove the last two lines.
My answer should also be the fastest solution of those listed to date for systems lacking the improved version of head. So, I think it is both the most robust and the fastest of all the answers listed.
head -n $((`(wc -l < Windows_Terminal.json)`)) Windows_Terminal.json
This will work on Linux and on MacOs, keep in mind Mac does not support a negative value. so This is quite handy.
n.b : replace Windows_Terminal.json with your file name
It is simple. You have to add + to the number of lines that you wanted to avoid.
This example gives to you all the lines except the first 9
tail -n +10 inputfile
(yes, not the first 10...because it counts different...if you want 10, just type
tail -n 11 inputfile)
Trying to debug an issue with a server and my only log file is a 20GB log file (with no timestamps even! Why do people use System.out.println() as logging? In production?!)
Using grep, I've found an area of the file that I'd like to take a look at, line 347340107.
Other than doing something like
head -<$LINENUM + 10> filename | tail -20
... which would require head to read through the first 347 million lines of the log file, is there a quick and easy command that would dump lines 347340100 - 347340200 (for example) to the console?
update I totally forgot that grep can print the context around a match ... this works well. Thanks!
I found two other solutions if you know the line number but nothing else (no grep possible):
Assuming you need lines 20 to 40,
sed -n '20,40p;41q' file_name
or
awk 'FNR>=20 && FNR<=40' file_name
When using sed it is more efficient to quit processing after having printed the last line than continue processing until the end of the file. This is especially important in the case of large files and printing lines at the beginning. In order to do so, the sed command above introduces the instruction 41q in order to stop processing after line 41 because in the example we are interested in lines 20-40 only. You will need to change the 41 to whatever the last line you are interested in is, plus one.
# print line number 52
sed -n '52p' # method 1
sed '52!d' # method 2
sed '52q;d' # method 3, efficient on large files
method 3 efficient on large files
fastest way to display specific lines
with GNU-grep you could just say
grep --context=10 ...
No there isn't, files are not line-addressable.
There is no constant-time way to find the start of line n in a text file. You must stream through the file and count newlines.
Use the simplest/fastest tool you have to do the job. To me, using head makes much more sense than grep, since the latter is way more complicated. I'm not saying "grep is slow", it really isn't, but I would be surprised if it's faster than head for this case. That'd be a bug in head, basically.
What about:
tail -n +347340107 filename | head -n 100
I didn't test it, but I think that would work.
I prefer just going into less and
typing 50% to goto halfway the file,
43210G to go to line 43210
:43210 to do the same
and stuff like that.
Even better: hit v to start editing (in vim, of course!), at that location. Now, note that vim has the same key bindings!
You can use the ex command, a standard Unix editor (part of Vim now), e.g.
display a single line (e.g. 2nd one):
ex +2p -scq file.txt
corresponding sed syntax: sed -n '2p' file.txt
range of lines (e.g. 2-5 lines):
ex +2,5p -scq file.txt
sed syntax: sed -n '2,5p' file.txt
from the given line till the end (e.g. 5th to the end of the file):
ex +5,p -scq file.txt
sed syntax: sed -n '2,$p' file.txt
multiple line ranges (e.g. 2-4 and 6-8 lines):
ex +2,4p +6,8p -scq file.txt
sed syntax: sed -n '2,4p;6,8p' file.txt
Above commands can be tested with the following test file:
seq 1 20 > file.txt
Explanation:
+ or -c followed by the command - execute the (vi/vim) command after file has been read,
-s - silent mode, also uses current terminal as a default output,
q followed by -c is the command to quit editor (add ! to do force quit, e.g. -scq!).
I'd first split the file into few smaller ones like this
$ split --lines=50000 /path/to/large/file /path/to/output/file/prefix
and then grep on the resulting files.
If your line number is 100 to read
head -100 filename | tail -1
Get ack
Ubuntu/Debian install:
$ sudo apt-get install ack-grep
Then run:
$ ack --lines=$START-$END filename
Example:
$ ack --lines=10-20 filename
From $ man ack:
--lines=NUM
Only print line NUM of each file. Multiple lines can be given with multiple --lines options or as a comma separated list (--lines=3,5,7). --lines=4-7 also works.
The lines are always output in ascending order, no matter the order given on the command line.
sed will need to read the data too to count the lines.
The only way a shortcut would be possible would there to be context/order in the file to operate on. For example if there were log lines prepended with a fixed width time/date etc.
you could use the look unix utility to binary search through the files for particular dates/times
Use
x=`cat -n <file> | grep <match> | awk '{print $1}'`
Here you will get the line number where the match occurred.
Now you can use the following command to print 100 lines
awk -v var="$x" 'NR>=var && NR<=var+100{print}' <file>
or you can use "sed" as well
sed -n "${x},${x+100}p" <file>
With sed -e '1,N d; M q' you'll print lines N+1 through M. This is probably a bit better then grep -C as it doesn't try to match lines to a pattern.
Building on Sklivvz' answer, here's a nice function one can put in a .bash_aliases file. It is efficient on huge files when printing stuff from the front of the file.
function middle()
{
startidx=$1
len=$2
endidx=$(($startidx+$len))
filename=$3
awk "FNR>=${startidx} && FNR<=${endidx} { print NR\" \"\$0 }; FNR>${endidx} { print \"END HERE\"; exit }" $filename
}
To display a line from a <textfile> by its <line#>, just do this:
perl -wne 'print if $. == <line#>' <textfile>
If you want a more powerful way to show a range of lines with regular expressions -- I won't say why grep is a bad idea for doing this, it should be fairly obvious -- this simple expression will show you your range in a single pass which is what you want when dealing with ~20GB text files:
perl -wne 'print if m/<regex1>/ .. m/<regex2>/' <filename>
(tip: if your regex has / in it, use something like m!<regex>! instead)
This would print out <filename> starting with the line that matches <regex1> up until (and including) the line that matches <regex2>.
It doesn't take a wizard to see how a few tweaks can make it even more powerful.
Last thing: perl, since it is a mature language, has many hidden enhancements to favor speed and performance. With this in mind, it makes it the obvious choice for such an operation since it was originally developed for handling large log files, text, databases, etc.
print line 5
sed -n '5p' file.txt
sed '5q' file.txt
print everything else than line 5
`sed '5d' file.txt
and my creation using google
#!/bin/bash
#removeline.sh
#remove deleting it comes move line xD
usage() { # Function: Print a help message.
echo "Usage: $0 -l LINENUMBER -i INPUTFILE [ -o OUTPUTFILE ]"
echo "line is removed from INPUTFILE"
echo "line is appended to OUTPUTFILE"
}
exit_abnormal() { # Function: Exit with error.
usage
exit 1
}
while getopts l:i:o:b flag
do
case "${flag}" in
l) line=${OPTARG};;
i) input=${OPTARG};;
o) output=${OPTARG};;
esac
done
if [ -f tmp ]; then
echo "Temp file:tmp exist. delete it yourself :)"
exit
fi
if [ -f "$input" ]; then
re_isanum='^[0-9]+$'
if ! [[ $line =~ $re_isanum ]] ; then
echo "Error: LINENUMBER must be a positive, whole number."
exit 1
elif [ $line -eq "0" ]; then
echo "Error: LINENUMBER must be greater than zero."
exit_abnormal
fi
if [ ! -z $output ]; then
sed -n "${line}p" $input >> $output
fi
if [ ! -z $input ]; then
# remove this sed command and this comes move line to other file
sed "${line}d" $input > tmp && cp tmp $input
fi
fi
if [ -f tmp ]; then
rm tmp
fi
You could try this command:
egrep -n "*" <filename> | egrep "<line number>"
Easy with perl! If you want to get line 1, 3 and 5 from a file, say /etc/passwd:
perl -e 'while(<>){if(++$l~~[1,3,5]){print}}' < /etc/passwd
I am surprised only one other answer (by Ramana Reddy) suggested to add line numbers to the output. The following searches for the required line number and colours the output.
file=FILE
lineno=LINENO
wb="107"; bf="30;1"; rb="101"; yb="103"
cat -n ${file} | { GREP_COLORS="se=${wb};${bf}:cx=${wb};${bf}:ms=${rb};${bf}:sl=${yb};${bf}" grep --color -C 10 "^[[:space:]]\\+${lineno}[[:space:]]"; }
I have a rather large file (150 million lines of 10 chars). I need to split it in 150 files of 2 million lines, with each output line being alternatively the first 5 characters or the last 5 characters of the source line.
I could do this in Perl rather quickly, but I was wondering if there was an easy solution using bash.
Any ideas?
Homework? :-)
I would think that a simple pipe with sed (to split each line into two) and split (to split things up into multiple files) would be enough.
The man command is your friend.
Added after confirmation that it is not homework:
How about
sed 's/\(.....\)\(.....\)/\1\n\2/' input_file | split -l 2000000 - out-prefix-
?
I think that something like this could work:
out_file=1
out_pairs=0
cat $in_file | while read line; do
if [ $out_pairs -gt 1000000 ]; then
out_file=$(($out_file + 1))
out_pairs=0
fi
echo "${line%?????}" >> out${out_file}
echo "${line#?????}" >> out${out_file}
out_pairs=$(($out_pairs + 1))
done
Not sure if it's simpler or more efficient than using Perl, though.
First five chars of each line variant, assuming that the large file called x.txt, and assuming it's OK to create files in the current directory with names x.txt.* :
split -l 2000000 x.txt x.txt.out && (for splitfile in x.txt.out*; do outfile="${splitfile}.firstfive"; echo "$splitfile -> $outfile"; cut -c 1-5 "$splitfile" > "$outfile"; done)
Why not just use native linux split function?
split -d -l 999999 input_filename
this will output new split files with file names like x00 x01 x02...
for more info see the manual
man split