Modify sed command to catch substrings - regex

I have the example text:
"are "insulin sensitizers" "
I am trying to use the below command to find and replace the xml quote command with a single quote but it only works for the first one and the second that follows "sensitizers" is left unchanged.
command:
grep -rl """ ./ | xargs sed -i "s/"/'/"
result:
"are 'insulin sensitizers" "
desired result:
"are 'insulin sensitizers' "

You will need to use g flag in sed for global substitution:
grep -Zirl """ . | xargs -0 sed -i "s/"/'/g"
Also note use of -Z option in grep and -0 in xargs to take care of files with special characters and whitespaces.
As per man grep:
-Z, --null
Output a zero byte (the ASCII NUL character) instead of the character that normally follows a file name.

Related

Delete any special character using Sed

I have yet another list of subdomain. I want to remove any Wildcard subdomain which include these special characters:
()!&$#*+?
Mostly, the data are prefixly random. Also, could be middle. Here's some sample of output data
(www.imgur.com
***************diet.blogspot.com
*-1.gbc.criteo.com
------------------------------------------------------------i.imgur.com
This has been quite an inconvenience while scanning through the list. As always, I'm trying sed to fix it:
sed -i "/[!()#$&?+]/d" foo.txt ###Didn't work
sed -i "/[\!\(\)\#\$\&\?\+]/d" ###Escaping char didn't work
Performing commands above still result in an unchanged list and the file still on original state. I'm thinking that; to fix this is to pipe series of sed command in order to remove it one by one:
cat foo.txt | sed -e "/!/d" -e "/#/d" -e "/\*/d" -e "/\$/d" -e "/(/d" -e "/)/d" -e "/+/d" -e "/\'/d" -e "/&/d" >> foo2.txt
cat foo.txt | sed -e "/\!/d" | sed -e "/\#/d" | sed -e "/\*/d" | sed -e "/\$/d" | sed -e "/\+/d" | sed -e "/\'/d" | sed -e "/\&/d" >> foo2.txt
If escaping all special char doesn't work, it must've been my false logic. Also tried with /g still doesn't increase my luck.
As a side note: I don't want - to be deleted as some valid subdomain can have - character:
line-apps.com
line-apps-beta.com
line-apps-rc.com
line-apps-dev.com
Any help would be cherished.
Using sed
$ sed '/[[:punct:]]/d' input_file
This should delete all lines with special characters, however, it would help if you provided sample data.
To do what you're trying to do in your answer (which adds [ and ] and more to the set of characters in your question) would be:
sed '/[][!?+,#$&*() ]/d'
or just:
grep -v '[][!?+,#$&*() ]'
Per POSIX to include ] in a bracket expression it must be the first character otherwise it indicates the end of the bracket expression.
Consider printing lines you want instead of deleting lines you do not want, though, e.g.:
grep '^[[:alnum:]_.-]$' file
to print lines that only contain letters, numbers, underscores, dashes, and/or periods.

Extract sub-string from strings based on condition with shell command line

I have lines in myfile like this:
mount -t cifs //hostname/path/ /mount/path/ -o username='xxxx',password='xxxxx'
I need to extract sub-strings from this based on condition "start with // till next white-space including //".
I can't parse with the position as it won't be the same in all matched lines.
So far I have extracted the sub-string using grep's perl assertion, but the result does not return the //.
The piece of code I've used is
cat myfile | grep " cifs " | grep -oP "(?<=/)[^\s]*" | grep -v ^/
Output:
hostname/path/
Expected Output:
//hostname/path/
Is there a way to get the desired output by modifying the perl regex, perhaps some other method?
Simple bash one line solution
grep " cifs " myfile | sed -e "s/ /\n/g" | grep '^\/\/'
You may consider using some non-PCRE based solutions like
sed -En '/ cifs /{s,.*(//[^[:space:]]+).*,\1,p}' file
grep -oE '//[^[:space:]]+' file
The grep solution simply extracts all occurrences of // and 1+ non-whitespace chars after from the file.
The sed solution finds lines containing cifs and then extracts the last occurrence of // and 1+ non-whitespace chars after on those lines.
Following command should do what you ask for
grep cifs myfile | cut -d ' ' -f 4
or
grep cifs myfile | nawk '{print $4}'
or
awk '/cifs/ { print $4 }' myfile
or
perl -ne "print $1 if /cifs\s+(\S+)/" myfile

Search and Replace String from text file Ubuntu

I have to replace following String
//#Config(manifest
with below string,
#Config(manifest
So this i created following regex
\/\/#Config\(manifest
And tried
grep -rl \/\/#Config\(manifest . | xargs sed -i "\/\/#Config\(manifest#Config\(manifest/g"
But i am getting following error:
sed: -e expression #1, char 38: Unmatched ( or \(
I have to search recursively and do this operation, though i am stuck with above error.
grep -rl '//#Config(manifest' | xargs sed -i 's|//#Config(manifest|#Config(manifest|g'
Specifying . for current directory is optional for grep -r
sed allows Any character other than backslash or newline to be used as delimiter
Edit
If file name contains spaces, use
grep -rlZ '//#Config(manifest' | xargs -0 sed -i 's|//#Config(manifest|#Config(manifest|g'
Explanation (assumes GNU version of commands)
grep
-r performs recursive search
-l option outputs only filenames instead of matched patterns
-Z outputs a zero byte (ASCII NUL character) after each file name instead of usual newline
'pattern' by default, grep uses BRE (basic regular expression) where characters like ( do not have special meaning and hence need not be escaped
xargs -0 tells xargs to separate arguments by the ASCII NUL character
sed
-i inplace edit, use -i.bkp if you want to create backup of original files
s|pattern|replace|g the g flag tells sed to search and replace all occurrences. sed also defaults to BRE and so no need to escape (. Using \( would mean start of capture groups and hence the error when it doesn't find the closing \)

having a regex replacing across lines, retain the newlines?

I'd like to have a substitute or print style command with a regex working across lines. And lines retained.
$ echo -e 'a\nb\nc\nd\ne\nf\ng' | tr -d '\n' | grep -or 'b.*f'
bcdef
or
$ echo -e 'a\nb\nc\nd\ne\nf\ng' | tr -d '\n' | sed -r 's|b(.*)f|y\1z|'
aycdezg
i'd like to use grep or sed because i'd like to know what people would've done before awk or perl ..
would they not have? was .* not available? had they no other equivalent?
to possibly modify some input with a regex that spans across lines, and print it to stdout or output to a file, retaining the lines.
This should do what you're looking for:
$ echo -e 'a\nb\nc\nd\ne\nf\ng' | sed ':a;$s/b\([^f]*\)f/y\1z/;N;ba'
a
y
c
d
e
z
g
It accumulates all the lines then does the replacement. It looks for the first "f". If you want it to look for the last "f", change [^f] to ..
Note that this may make use of features added to sed after AWK or Perl became available (AWK has been around a looong time).
Edit:
To do a multi-line grep requires only a little modification:
$ echo -e 'a\nb\nc\nd\ne\nf\ng' | sed ':a;$s/^[^b]*\(b[^f]*f\)[^f]*$/\1/;N;ba'
b
c
d
e
f
sed can match across newlines through the use of its N command. For example, the following sed command will replace bar followed a newline followed by foo with ###:
$ echo -e "foo\nbar\nbaz\nqux" | sed 'N;s/bar\nbaz/###/;P;D'
foo
###
qux
The N command will append the next input line to the current pattern space separated by an embedded newline (\n)
The P command will print the current pattern space up to and including the first embedded newline.
The D command will delete up to and including the first embedded newline in the pattern space. It will also start next cycle but skip reading from the input if there is still data in the pattern space.
Through the use of these 3 commands, you can essentially do any sort of s command replacement looking across N-lines.
Edit
If your question is how can I remove the need for tr in the two examples above and just use sed then here you go:
$ echo -e 'a\nb\nc\nd\ne\nf\ng' | sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n//g;y/ag/yz/'
ybcdefz
Proven tools to the rescue.
echo -e "foo\nbar\nbaz\nqux" | perl -lpe 'BEGIN{$/=""}s/foo\nbar/###/'

How to find patterns across multiple lines using grep?

I want to find files that have "abc" AND "efg" in that order, and those two strings are on different lines in that file. Eg: a file with content:
blah blah..
blah blah..
blah abc blah
blah blah..
blah blah..
blah blah..
blah efg blah blah
blah blah..
blah blah..
Should be matched.
Grep is an awkward tool for this operation.
pcregrep which is found in most of the modern Linux systems can be used as
pcregrep -M 'abc.*(\n|.)*efg' test.txt
where -M, --multiline allow patterns to match more than one line
There is a newer pcre2grep also. Both are provided by the PCRE project.
pcre2grep is available for Mac OS X via Mac Ports as part of port pcre2:
% sudo port install pcre2
and via Homebrew as:
% brew install pcre
or for pcre2
% brew install pcre2
pcre2grep is also available on Linux (Ubuntu 18.04+)
$ sudo apt install pcre2-utils # PCRE2
$ sudo apt install pcregrep # Older PCRE
Here is a solution inspired by this answer:
if 'abc' and 'efg' can be on the same line:
grep -zl 'abc.*efg' <your list of files>
if 'abc' and 'efg' must be on different lines:
grep -Pzl '(?s)abc.*\n.*efg' <your list of files>
Params:
-P Use perl compatible regular expressions (PCRE).
-z Treat the input as a set of lines, each terminated by a zero byte instead of a newline. i.e. grep treats the input as a one big line. Note that if you don't use -l it will display matches followed by a NUL char, see comments.
-l list matching filenames only.
(?s) activate PCRE_DOTALL, which means that '.' finds any character or newline.
I'm not sure if it is possible with grep, but sed makes it very easy:
sed -e '/abc/,/efg/!d' [file-with-content]
sed should suffice as poster LJ stated above,
instead of !d you can simply use p to print:
sed -n '/abc/,/efg/p' file
I relied heavily on pcregrep, but with newer grep you do not need to install pcregrep for many of its features. Just use grep -P.
In the example of the OP's question, I think the following options work nicely, with the second best matching how I understand the question:
grep -Pzo "abc(.|\n)*efg" /tmp/tes*
grep -Pzl "abc(.|\n)*efg" /tmp/tes*
I copied the text as /tmp/test1 and deleted the 'g' and saved as /tmp/test2. Here is the output showing that the first shows the matched string and the second shows only the filename (typical -o is to show match and typical -l is to show only filename). Note that the 'z' is necessary for multiline and the '(.|\n)' means to match either 'anything other than newline' or 'newline' - i.e. anything:
user#host:~$ grep -Pzo "abc(.|\n)*efg" /tmp/tes*
/tmp/test1:abc blah
blah blah..
blah blah..
blah blah..
blah efg
user#host:~$ grep -Pzl "abc(.|\n)*efg" /tmp/tes*
/tmp/test1
To determine if your version is new enough, run man grep and see if something similar to this appears near the top:
-P, --perl-regexp
Interpret PATTERN as a Perl regular expression (PCRE, see
below). This is highly experimental and grep -P may warn of
unimplemented features.
That is from GNU grep 2.10.
This can be done easily by first using tr to replace the newlines with some other character:
tr '\n' '\a' | grep -o 'abc.*def' | tr '\a' '\n'
Here, I am using the alarm character, \a (ASCII 7) in place of a newline.
This is almost never found in your text, and grep can match it with a ., or match it specifically with \a.
awk one-liner:
awk '/abc/,/efg/' [file-with-content]
If you are willing to use contexts, this could be achieved by typing
grep -A 500 abc test.txt | grep -B 500 efg
This will display everything between "abc" and "efg", as long as they are within 500 lines of each other.
You can do that very easily if you can use Perl.
perl -ne 'if (/abc/) { $abc = 1; next }; print "Found in $ARGV\n" if ($abc && /efg/); }' yourfilename.txt
You can do that with a single regular expression too, but that involves taking the entire contents of the file into a single string, which might end up taking up too much memory with large files.
For completeness, here is that method:
perl -e '#lines = <>; $content = join("", #lines); print "Found in $ARGV\n" if ($content =~ /abc.*efg/s);' yourfilename.txt
I don't know how I would do that with grep, but I would do something like this with awk:
awk '/abc/{ln1=NR} /efg/{ln2=NR} END{if(ln1 && ln2 && ln1 < ln2){print "found"}else{print "not found"}}' foo
You need to be careful how you do this, though. Do you want the regex to match the substring or the entire word? add \w tags as appropriate. Also, while this strictly conforms to how you stated the example, it doesn't quite work when abc appears a second time after efg. If you want to handle that, add an if as appropriate in the /abc/ case etc.
If you need both words are close each other, for example no more than 3 lines, you can do this:
find . -exec grep -Hn -C 3 "abc" {} \; | grep -C 3 "efg"
Same example but filtering only *.txt files:
find . -name *.txt -exec grep -Hn -C 3 "abc" {} \; | grep -C 3 "efg"
And also you can replace grep command with egrep command if you want also find with regular expressions.
I released a grep alternative a few days ago that does support this directly, either via multiline matching or using conditions - hopefully it is useful for some people searching here. This is what the commands for the example would look like:
Multiline:
sift -lm 'abc.*efg' testfile
Conditions:
sift -l 'abc' testfile --followed-by 'efg'
You could also specify that 'efg' has to follow 'abc' within a certain number of lines:
sift -l 'abc' testfile --followed-within 5:'efg'
You can find more information on sift-tool.org.
Possible with ripgrep:
$ rg --multiline 'abc(\n|.)+?efg' test.txt
3:blah abc blah
4:blah abc blah
5:blah blah..
6:blah blah..
7:blah blah..
8:blah efg blah blah
Or some other incantations.
If you want . to count as a newline:
$ rg --multiline '(?s)abc.+?efg' test.txt
3:blah abc blah
4:blah abc blah
5:blah blah..
6:blah blah..
7:blah blah..
8:blah efg blah blah
Or equivalent to having the (?s) would be rg --multiline --multiline-dotall
And to answer the original question, where they have to be on separate lines:
$ rg --multiline 'abc.*[\n](\n|.)*efg' test.txt
And if you want it "non greedy" so you don't just get the first abc with the last efg (separate them into pairs):
$ rg --multiline 'abc.*[\n](\n|.)*?efg' test.txt
https://til.hashrocket.com/posts/9zneks2cbv-multiline-matches-with-ripgrep-rg
Sadly, you can't. From the grep docs:
grep searches the named input FILEs (or standard input if no files are named, or if a single hyphen-minus (-) is given as file name) for lines containing a match to the given PATTERN.
While the sed option is the simplest and easiest, LJ's one-liner is sadly not the most portable. Those stuck with a version of the C Shell (instead of bash) will need to escape their bangs:
sed -e '/abc/,/efg/\!d' [file]
Which line unfortunately does not work in bash et al.
With silver searcher:
ag 'abc.*(\n|.)*efg' your_filename
similar to ring bearer's answer, but with ag instead. Speed advantages of silver searcher could possibly shine here.
#!/bin/bash
shopt -s nullglob
for file in *
do
r=$(awk '/abc/{f=1}/efg/{g=1;exit}END{print g&&f ?1:0}' file)
if [ "$r" -eq 1 ];then
echo "Found pattern in $file"
else
echo "not found"
fi
done
you can use grep incase you are not keen in the sequence of the pattern.
grep -l "pattern1" filepattern*.* | xargs grep "pattern2"
example
grep -l "vector" *.cpp | xargs grep "map"
grep -l will find all the files which matches the first pattern, and xargs will grep for the second pattern. Hope this helps.
If you have some estimation about the distance between the 2 strings 'abc' and 'efg' you are looking for, you might use:
grep -r . -e 'abc' -A num1 -B num2 | grep 'efg'
That way, the first grep will return the line with the 'abc' plus #num1 lines after it, and #num2 lines after it, and the second grep will sift through all of those to get the 'efg'.
Then you'll know at which files they appear together.
With ugrep released a few months ago:
ugrep 'abc(\n|.)+?efg'
This tool is highly optimized for speed. It's also GNU/BSD/PCRE-grep compatible.
Note that we should use a lazy repetition +?, unless you want to match all lines with efg together until the last efg in the file.
You have at least a couple options --
DOTALL method
use (?s) to DOTALL the . character to include \n
you can also use a lookahead (?=\n) -- won't be captured in match
example-text:
true
match me
false
match me one
false
match me two
true
match me three
third line!!
{BLANK_LINE}
command:
grep -Pozi '(?s)true.+?\n(?=\n)' example-text
-p for perl regular expressions
-o to only match pattern, not whole line
-z to allow line breaks
-i makes case-insensitive
output:
true
match me
true
match me three
third line!!
notes:
- +? makes modifier non-greedy so matches shortest string instead of largest (prevents from returning one match containing entire text)
you can use the oldschool O.G. manual method using \n
command:
grep -Pozi 'true(.|\n)+?\n(?=\n)'
output:
true
match me
true
match me three
third line!!
I used this to extract a fasta sequence from a multi fasta file using the -P option for grep:
grep -Pzo ">tig00000034[^>]+" file.fasta > desired_sequence.fasta
P for perl based searches
z for making a line end in 0 bytes rather than newline char
o to just capture what matched since grep returns the whole line (which in this case since you did -z is the whole file).
The core of the regexp is the [^>] which translates to "not the greater than symbol"
As an alternative to Balu Mohan's answer, it is possible to enforce the order of the patterns using only grep, head and tail:
for f in FILEGLOB; do tail $f -n +$(grep -n "pattern1" $f | head -n1 | cut -d : -f 1) 2>/dev/null | grep "pattern2" &>/dev/null && echo $f; done
This one isn't very pretty, though. Formatted more readably:
for f in FILEGLOB; do
tail $f -n +$(grep -n "pattern1" $f | head -n1 | cut -d : -f 1) 2>/dev/null \
| grep -q "pattern2" \
&& echo $f
done
This will print the names of all files where "pattern2" appears after "pattern1", or where both appear on the same line:
$ echo "abc
def" > a.txt
$ echo "def
abc" > b.txt
$ echo "abcdef" > c.txt; echo "defabc" > d.txt
$ for f in *.txt; do tail $f -n +$(grep -n "abc" $f | head -n1 | cut -d : -f 1) 2>/dev/null | grep -q "def" && echo $f; done
a.txt
c.txt
d.txt
Explanation
tail -n +i - print all lines after the ith, inclusive
grep -n - prepend matching lines with their line numbers
head -n1 - print only the first row
cut -d : -f 1 - print the first cut column using : as the delimiter
2>/dev/null - silence tail error output that occurs if the $() expression returns empty
grep -q - silence grep and return immediately if a match is found, since we are only interested in the exit code
This should work too?!
perl -lpne 'print $ARGV if /abc.*?efg/s' file_list
$ARGV contains the name of the current file when reading from file_list
/s modifier searches across newline.
The filepattern *.sh is important to prevent directories to be inspected. Of course some test could prevent that too.
for f in *.sh
do
a=$( grep -n -m1 abc $f )
test -n "${a}" && z=$( grep -n efg $f | tail -n 1) || continue
(( ((${z/:*/}-${a/:*/})) > 0 )) && echo $f
done
The
grep -n -m1 abc $f
searches maximum 1 matching and returns (-n) the linenumber.
If a match was found (test -n ...) find the last match of efg (find all and take the last with tail -n 1).
z=$( grep -n efg $f | tail -n 1)
else continue.
Since the result is something like 18:foofile.sh String alf="abc"; we need to cut away from ":" till end of line.
((${z/:*/}-${a/:*/}))
Should return a positive result if the last match of the 2nd expression is past the first match of the first.
Then we report the filename echo $f.
To search recursively across all files (across multiple lines within each file) with BOTH strings present (i.e. string1 and string2 on different lines and both present in same file):
grep -r -l 'string1' * > tmp; while read p; do grep -l 'string2' $p; done < tmp; rm tmp
To search recursively across all files (across multiple lines within each file) with EITHER string present (i.e. string1 and string2 on different lines and either present in same file):
grep -r -l 'string1\|string2' *
Here's a way by using two greps in a row:
egrep -o 'abc|efg' $file | grep -A1 abc | grep efg | wc -l
returns 0 or a positive integer.
egrep -o (Only shows matches, trick: multiple matches on the same line produce multi-line output as if they are on different lines)
grep -A1 abc (print abc and the line after it)
grep efg | wc -l (0-n count of efg lines found after abc on the same or following lines, result can be used in an 'if")
grep can be changed to egrep etc. if pattern matching is needed
This should work:
cat FILE | egrep 'abc|efg'
If there is more than one match you can filter out using grep -v