Search and replace one-liner preserve newline characters - regex

sample_file:
this is a test line!
this is a test line!
this is a test line!
this is a test line!
I'm using a Perl one-liner to replace text like this:
perl -pi -e 's{this(.*)\s}{\n\1\n}i && s{.*\n}{}' sample_file
The this(.*)\s part and \1 part are variable and I cannot change that (it comes from user input).
My problem is that I need to adjust the {\n\1\n} part depending on whether the first regex includes the newline character .
For example, if the first regex is {this(.*)\s} I need {\n\1\n}, but if the first is like {(.*)a test} I need {\n\1}.
How can I check whether the newline character is lost and put it back if necessary?

Generally speaking, you want to chomp inputs lines, and add a newline to output lines. -l (in conjunction with -n or -p) will do both.
For example, the following doesn't replace the newline with ! because it was removed by -l (and subsequently re-added by the print).
perl -i -ple's/\s/!/g' file
By the way, \1 ("match what the first capture captured") makes no sense in a substitution. You want $1 (as -w would tell you).

Related

Using grep to extract very specific strings from binary file

I have a large binary file. I want to extract certain strings from it and copy them to a new text file.
For example, in:
D-wM-^?^#^#^#^#^#^#^#^Y^#^#^#^#^#^#^#M-lM-FM-MM-[o#^B^#M-lM-FM MM-[o#^B^#^#^#^#^#E7cacscKLrrok9bwC3Z64NTnZM-^G
I want to take the number '7' (after the #^#^#E) and every character after it stopping at the Z ('ignoring the M-^G).
I want to copy this 7cacscKLrrok9bwC3Z64NTnZ to a new file.
There will be multiple such strings in one file. The end will always be denoted by the M- (which I don't want copied). The start will always be denoted by a 7 (which I do want copied).
Unfortunately, my knowledge of grep, sed, etc, does not extend to this level. Can someone please suggest a viable way to achieve this?
cat -v filename | grep [7][A-Z,a-z] will show all strings with a '7' followed by a letter but that's not much.
Thank you.
I've noticed that my requirements are rather more complicated.
(I've performed the correct - I hope - formatting this time). Thanks to 'tshiono' for his (?) answer to the earlier submission.
I want to check the ending of a string and, if it ends in M-, grep another string that follows it (with junk in between). If the string does not end in M-, then I don't want it copied (let alone any other strings).
So what I would like is:
grep -a -Po "7[[:alnum:]]+(?=M-)" file_name and if the ending is M- then grep -a -Po "5x[[:alnum:]]+(?=\^)" file_name to copy the string that starts with 5x and ends with a ^.
In this example:
D-wM-^?^#^#^#^#^#^#^#^Y^#^#^#^#^#^#^#M-lM-FM-MM-[o#^B^#M-lM-FM MM-[o#^B^#^#^#^#^#E7cacscKLrrok9bwC3Z64NTnZM-^GwM-^?^#^#^#^#^#^#^#^Y^#^#^#^#^#^#^#M-lM-FM-MM-[o#^B^#M-lM5x8w09qewqlkcklwnlkewflewfiewjfoewnflwenfwlkfwelk^89038432nowefe
The outcome would be:
7cacscKLrrok9bwC3Z64NTnZ
5x8w09qewqlkcklwnlkewflewfiewjfoewnflwenfwlkfwelk
However, if the ending is not M- (more precisely, if the ending is ^S), then do not try the second grep and do not record anything at all.
In this example:
D-wM-^?^#^#^#^#^#^#^#^Y^#^#^#^#^#^#^#M-lM-FM-MM-[o#^B^#M-lM-FM MM-[o#^B^#^#^#^#^#E7cacscKLrrok9bwC3Z64NTnZ^SGwM-^?^#^#^#^#^#^#^#^Y^#^#^#^#^#^#^#M-lM-FM-MM-[o#^B^#M-lM5x8w09qewqlkcklwnlkewflewfiewjfoewnflwenfwlkfwelk^89038432nowefe
The outcome would be null (nothing copied) as the 7cacs... string ends in ^S.
Is grep the correct tool? Grep a file and if the condition in the grep command is 'yes' then issue a different grep command but if the condition is 'no' then do nothing.
Thanks again.
I have noticed one addition modification.
Can one add an OR command to the second part? Grep if the second string starts with 5x OR 6x?
In the example below, grep -aPo "7[[:alnum:]]+M-.*?5x[[:alnum:]]+\^" filename | grep -aPo "7[[:alnum:]]+(?=M-)|5x[[:alnum:]]+(?=\^)" will extract the strings starting with 7 and the strings starting with 5x.
How can one change the 5x to 5x or 6x?
D-wM-^?^#^#^#^#^#^#^#^Y^#^#^#^#^#^#^#M-lM-FM-MM-[o#^B^#M-lM-FM MM-[o#^B^#^#^#^#^#E7cacscKLrrok9bwC3Z64NTnZM-^GwM-^?^#^#^#^#^#^#^#^Y^#^#^#^#^#^#^#M-lM-FM-MM-[o#^B^#M-lM5x8w09qewqlkcklwnlkewflewfiewjfoewnflwenfwlkfwelk^89038432nowefe
D-wM-^?^#^#^#^#^#^#^#^Y^#^#^#^#^#^#^#M-lM-FM-MM-[o#^B^#M-lM-FM MM-[o#^B^#^#^#^#^#E7AAAAAscKLrrok9bwC3Z64NTnZM-^GwM-^?^#^#^#^#^#^#^#^Y^#^#^#^#^#^#^#M-lM-FM-MM-[o#^B^#M-lM6x8w09qewqlkcklwnlkewflewfiewjfoewnflwenfwlkfwelk^89038432nowefe
In this example, the desired outcome would be:
7cacscKLrrok9bwC3Z64NTnZ
5x8w09qewqlkcklwnlkewflewfiewjfoewnflwenfwlkfwelk
7AAAAAscKLrrok9bwC3Z64NTnZ
6x8w09qewqlkcklwnlkewflewfiewjfoewnflwenfwlkfwelk
UPDATE MARCH 09:
I need to create a series of complex grep (or perl) commands to extract strings from a series of binary files.
I need two strings from the binary file.
The first string will always start with a 1.
The first string will end with a letter or number. The next letter will always be a lower case k. I do not want this k character.
The difficulty is that the ending k will not always be the first k in the string. It might be the first k but it might not.
After the k, there is a second string. The second string will always start with an A or a B.
The ending of the second string will be in one of two forms:
a) it will end with a space then display the first three characters from the first string in lower case followed by a )
b) it will end with a ^K then display the first three characters from the first string in lower case.
For example:
1pppsx9YPar8Rvs75tJYWZq3eo8PgwbckB4m4zT7Yg042KIDYUE82e893hY ppp)
Should be:
1pppsx9YPar8Rvs75tJYWZq3eo8Pgwbc and B4m4zT7Yg042KIDYUE82e893hY - delete the k and the space then ppp.
For example:
1zzzsx9YPkr8Rvs75tJYWZq3eo8PgwbckA2m4zT7Yg042KIDYUE82e893hY^Kzzz
Should be:
1zzzsx9YPkar8Rvs75tJYWZq3eo8Pgwbc and A4m4zT7Yg042KIDYUE82e893hY - delete the second k and the ^Kzzz.
In the second example, we see that the first k is part of the first string. It is the k before the A that breaks up the first and second strings.
I hope there is a super grep expert who can help! Many thanks!
If your grep supports -P option, would you please try:
grep -a -Po "7[[:alnum:]]+(?=M-)" file
The -a option forces grep to read the input as a text file.
The -P option enables the perl-compatible regex.
The -o option tells grep to print only the matched substring(s).
The pattern (?=M-) is a zero-width lookahead assertion (introduced in
Perl) without including it in the result.
Alternatively you can also say with sed:
sed 's/M-/\n/g' file | sed -n 's/.*\(7[[:alnum:]]\+\).*/\1/p'
The first sed command splits the input file into miltiple lines by
replacing the substring M- with a newline.
It has two benefits: it breaks the lines to allow multiple matches with
sed and excludes the unnecessary portion M- from the input.
The next sed command extracts the desired pattern from the input.
It assumes your sed accepts \n in the replacement, which is
a GNU extension (not POSIX compliant). Otherwise please try (in case you are working on bash):
sed 's/M-/\'$'\n''/g' file | sed -n 's/.*\(7[[:alnum:]]\+\).*/\1/p'
[UPDATE]
(The requirement has been updated by the OP and the followings are solutions according to it.)
Let me assume the string which starts with 7 and ends with M- is always followed
by another (no more and no less than one) string which starts with 5x and ends
with ^ (ascii caret character) with junks in between.
Then would you please try the following:
grep -aPo "7[[:alnum:]]+M-.*?5x[[:alnum:]]+\^" file | grep -aPo "7[[:alnum:]]+(?=M-)|5x[[:alnum:]]+(?=\^)"
It executes the task in two steps (two cascaded greps).
The 1st grep narrows down the input data into the candidate substring
which will include the desired two sequences and junks in between.
The regex .*? in between matches any (ascii or binary) characters
except for a newline character.
The trailing ? enables the shortest match
which avoids the overrun due to the greedy nature of regex. The regex is intended to match junks in between.
The 2nd grep includes two regex's merged with a pipe | meaning logical OR.
Then it extracts two desired sequences.
A potential problem of grep solution is that grep is a line oriented command
and cannot include the newline character in the matched string.
If a newline character is included in the junks in between (I'm not sure about the possibility), the above solution will fail.
As a workaround, perl will provide flexible manipulations with binary data.
perl -0777 -ne '
while (/(7[[:alnum:]]+)M-.*?(5x[[:alnum:]]+)\^/sg) {
printf("%s\n%s\n", $1, $2);
}
' file
The regex is mostly same as that of grep because the -P option of grep means
perl-compatible.
It can capture multiple patterns at once in variables $1 and $2 hence just one regex is enough.
The -0777 option to the perl command tells perl to slurp all data
at once.
The s option at the end the regex makes a dot match a newline character.
The g option enables the global (multiple) match.
[UPDATE2]
In order to make the regex match either 5x or 6x, replace 5x with (5|6)x.
Namely:
grep -aPo "7[[:alnum:]]+M-.*?(5|6)x[[:alnum:]]+\^" file | grep -aPo "7[[:alnum:]]+(?=M-)|(5|6)x[[:alnum:]]+(?=\^)"
As mentioned before, the pipe | means OR. The OR operator has the lowest priority in the evaluation, hence you need to enclose them with parens in this case.
If there is a possibility any other number than 5 or 6 may appear, it will be safer to put [[:digit:]] instead, which matches any one digit betweeen 0 and 9:
grep -aPo "7[[:alnum:]]+M-.*?[[:digit:]]x[[:alnum:]]+\^" file | grep -aPo "7[[:alnum:]]+(?=M-)|[[:digit:]]x[[:alnum:]]+(?=\^)"
[UPDATE3]
(Answering the OP's requirement on March 9th)
Let me start with a perl code which regex will be relatively easier
to explain.
perl -0777 -ne 'while (/(1(.{3}).+)k([AB].*)[\013 ]\2/g){print "$1 $3\n"}' file
Output:
1pppsx9YPar8Rvs75tJYWZq3eo8Pgwbc B4m4zT7Yg042KIDYUE82e893hY
1zzzsx9YPkr8Rvs75tJYWZq3eo8Pgwbc A2m4zT7Yg042KIDYUE82e893hY
[Explanation of regex]
(1(.{3}).+)k([AB].*)[\013 ]\2
( start of the 1st capture group referred by $1 later
1 literal "1"
( start of the 2nd capture group referred by \2 later
.{3} a sequence of the identical three characters such as ppp or zzz
) end of the 2nd capture group
.+ followed by any characters with "greedy" match which may include the 1st "k"
) end of the 1st capture group
k literal "k"
( start of the 3rd capture group referred by $3 later
[AB].* the character "A" or "B" followed by any characters
) end of the 3rd capture group
[\013 ] followed by ^K or a whitespace
\2 followed by the capture group 2 previously assigned
When implementing it with grep, we will encounter a limitation of grep.
Although we want to extract multiple patterns from the input file,
the -e option (which can specify multiple search patterns) does not
work with -P option. Then we need to split the regex into two patterns
such as:
grep -Po "(1(.{3}).+)(?=k([AB].*)[\013 ]\2)" file
grep -Po "(1(.{3}).+)k\K([AB].*)(?=[\013 ]\2)" file
And the result will be:
1pppsx9YPar8Rvs75tJYWZq3eo8Pgwbc
1zzzsx9YPkr8Rvs75tJYWZq3eo8Pgwbc
B4m4zT7Yg042KIDYUE82e893hY
A2m4zT7Yg042KIDYUE82e893hY
Please be noted the order of output is not same as the order of appearance in the original file.
Another option will be to introduce ripgrep or rg which is a fast
and versatile version of grep. You may need to install ripgrep with
sudo apt install ripgrep or using other package handling tool.
An advantage of ripgrep is it supports -r (replace) option in which
you can make use of the backreferences:
rg -N -Po "(1(.{3}).+)k([AB].*)[\013 ]\2" -r '$1 $3' file
The -r '$1 $3' option prints the 1st and the 3rd capture groups and the result will be the same as perl.
In the general case, you can use the strings utility to pluck out ASCII from binary files; then of course you can try to grep that output for patterns that you find interesting.
Many traditional Unix utilities like grep have internal special markers which might get messed up by binary input. For example, the character \xFF was used for internal purposes by some versions of GNU grep so you can't grep for that character even if you can figure out a way to represent it in the shell (Bash supports $'\xff' for example).
A traditional approach would be to run hexdump or a similar utility, and then grep that for patterns. However, more modern scripting languages like Perl and Python make it easy to manipulate arbitrary binary data.
perl -ne 'print if m/\xff\xff/' </dev/urandom
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed -En '/\n/!{s/M-\^G/\n/;s/7[^\n]*\n/\n&/};/^7[^\n]*/P;D' file
Split each line into zero or more lines that begin with 7 and end just before M-^G and only print such lines.

s/// returns out of place newline

I'm trying to use Perl to reorder the content of an md5 file. For each line, I want the filename without the path then the hash. The best command I've come up with is:
$ perl -pe 's|^([[:alnum:]]+).*?([^/]+)$|$2 $1|' DCIM.md5
The input file (DCIM.md5) is produced by md5sum on Linux. It looks like this:
e26ff03dc1bac80226e200c0c63d17a2 ./Path1/IMG_20150201_160548.jpg
01f92572e4c6f2ea42bd904497e4f939 ./Path 2/IMG_20150204_190528.jpg
afce027c977944188b4f97c5dd1bd101 ./Path3/Path 4/IMG_20151011_193008.jpg
The hash is matched by the first group ([[:alnum:]]+) in the
regular expression.
Then the spaces and the path to the file are
matched by .*?.
Then the filename is matched by ([^/]+).
The expression is enclosed with ^ (apparently non-necessary here)
and $. Without the $, the expression does not output what I expect.
I use | rather than / as a separator to avoid escaping it in file paths.
That command returns:
IMG_20150201_160548.jpg
e26ff03dc1bac80226e200c0c63d17a2IMG_20150204_190528.jpg
01f92572e4c6f2ea42bd904497e4f939IMG_20151011_193008.jpg
afce027c977944188b4f97c5dd1bd101IMG_20151011_195133.jpg
The matching is correct, the output sequence is correct (filename without path then hash) but the spacing is not: there's a newline after the filename. I expect it after the hash, like this:
IMG_20150201_160548.jpg e26ff03dc1bac80226e200c0c63d17a2
IMG_20150204_190528.jpg 01f92572e4c6f2ea42bd904497e4f939
IMG_20151011_193008.jpg afce027c977944188b4f97c5dd1bd101
It seems to me that my command outputs the newline character, but I don't know how to change this behavior.
Or possibly the problem comes from the shell, not the command?
Finally, some version information:
$ perl -version
This is perl 5, version 22, subversion 1 (v5.22.1) built for i686-linux-gnu-thread-multi-64int
(with 69 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)
[^/]+ matches newlines, so the ones in your input are part of $2, which gets put first in your transformed $_ (And there's no newline in $1 so there's no newline at the end of $_...)
Solution: Read up on the -l option from perlrun. In particular:
-l[octnum]
enables automatic line-ending processing. It has two separate effects. First, it automatically chomps $/ (the input record separator) when used with -n or -p. Second, it assigns $\ (the output record separator) to have the value of octnum so that any print statements will have that separator added back on. If octnum is omitted, sets $\ to the current value of $/ .
Alternate solution, which uses lots of concepts from other answers, and comments ...
$ perl -pe 's|(\p{hex}+).*?([^/]+?)$|$2 $1|' DCIM.md5
... and explanation.
After investigating all the answers and trying to figure them out, I've decided that the base of the problem is that the [^/]+ is greedy. Its greediness causes it to capture the newline; it ignores the $ anchor.
This was hard for me to figure out, since I did a lot of parsing using sed before using Perl, and even a greedy wildcard won't capture a newline in sed. Hopefully this post will help those who (being used to sed as I am) are also wondering (as I did) why the $ isn't acting "as I expect it to."
We can see the "greedy" issue by trying what I'll post as another, alternate answer.
Write the file:
$ cat > DCIM.md5<<EOF
> e26ff03dc1bac80226e200c0c63d17a2 ./Path1/IMG_20150201_160548.jpg
> 01f92572e4c6f2ea42bd904497e4f939 ./Path 2/IMG_20150204_190528.jpg
> afce027c977944188b4f97c5dd1bd101 ./Path3/Path 4/IMG_20151011_193008.jpg
> EOF
Get rid of the greedy [^/]+ by changing it to [^/]+?. Parse.
$ perl -pe 's|([[:alnum:]]+).*?([^/]+?)$|$2 $1|' DCIM.md5
IMG_20150201_160548.jpg e26ff03dc1bac80226e200c0c63d17a2
IMG_20150204_190528.jpg 01f92572e4c6f2ea42bd904497e4f939
IMG_20151011_193008.jpg afce027c977944188b4f97c5dd1bd101
Desired output accomplished.
The accepted answer, by #Shawn,
$ perl -lpe 's|^([[:alnum:]]+).*?([^/]+)$|$2 $1|' DCIM.md5
basically changes the $ anchor so as to behave the way a sed person would expect it to.
The answer by #CrafterKolyan takes care of the greedy [^/] capturing the newline by saying you can't have a forward-slash or a newline. This answer still needs the $ anchor to prevent the following situation
1) .* captures the empty string (0 or more of any character)
2) [^/\n]+ captures . .
The answer by #Borodin takes a quite different approach, but it's a great concept.
#Borodin, in addition, made a great comment that allows a more-precise/more-exact version of this answer, which is the version I put at the top of this post.
Finally, if one wants to follow the Perl programming model, here's another alternative.
$ perl -pe 's|([[:xdigit:]]+).*?([^/]+?)(\n\|\Z)|$2 $1$3|' DCIM.md5
P.S. Because sed isn't quite like perl (no non-greedy wildcards,) here's a sed example that shows the behavior I discuss.
$ sed 's|^\([[:alnum:]]\+\).*/\([^/]\+\)$|\2 \1|' DCIM.md5
This is basically a "direct translation" of the perl expression except for the extra '/' before the [^/] stuff. I hope it will help those comparing sed and perl.
use [^/\n] instead of [^/]:
perl -pe 's|^([[:alnum:]]+).*?([^/\n]+)$|$2 $1|' DCIM.md5
Doing a substitution leaves you having to write a regex pattern that matches everything you don't want as well as everything you do. It's usually much better to match just the parts you need and build another string from them
Like this
for ( <> ) {
die unless m< (\w++) .*? ([^/\s]+) \s* \z >x;
print "$2 $1\n";
}
or if you must have a one-liner
perl -ne 'die unless m< (\w++) .*? ([^/\s]+) \s*\z >x; print "$2 $1\n";' myfile.md5
output
IMG_20150201_160548.jpg e26ff03dc1bac80226e200c0c63d17a2
IMG_20150204_190528.jpg 01f92572e4c6f2ea42bd904497e4f939
IMG_20151011_193008.jpg afce027c977944188b4f97c5dd1bd101

I need to use sed to comment out two lines in a text file

I am running a custom kernel build and have created a custom config file in a bash script, now I need to comment out two lines in Kbuild in order to prevent the bc compiler from running. The lines are...
$(obj)/$(timeconst-file): kernel/time/timeconst.bc FORCE
$(call filechk,gentimeconst)
Using Expresso, I have a regex that matches the first line...
^\$\(obj\)\/\$\(timeconst-file\): kernel\/time\/timeconst\.bc FORCE
Regex Match
But can't get sed to actually insert a # in front of the line.
Any help would be much appreciated.
sed -i "/<Something that matches the lines to be replaced>/s/^#*/#/g"
This uses a regex to select lines you want to comment/<something>/, then substitutes /s/ the start of the string ^(plus any #*s already there, with #. So you can comment lines that are already commented no problem. the /g means continue after you found your first match, so you can do mass commenting.
I have a bash script that I can mass comment using the above as:
sed -i.bkp "/$1/s/^#\+\s*//g" $2
i.bkp makes a backup of the file named .bkp
Script is called ./comment.sh <match> <filename>
The match does not have to match the entire line, just enough to make it only hit lines you want.
You can use following sed for replacement:
sed 's,^\($(obj)/$(timeconst-file): kernel/time/timeconst.bc FORCE\),#\1,'
You don't need to escape ( ) or $, as in sed without -r it is treated as literal, for grouping \( \) is used.

Grep invert on string matched, not line matched

I'll keep this explanation of why I need help to a mimimum. One of my file directories got hacked through XSS and placed a long string at the beginning of all php files. I've tried to use sed to replace the string with nothing but it won't work because the pattern to match includes many many characters that would need to be escaped.
I found out that I can use fgrep to match a fixed string saved in a pattern file, but I'd like to replace the matched string (NOT THE LINE) in each file, but grep's -v inverts the result on the line, rather than the end of the matched string.
This is the command I'm using on an example file that contains the hacked
fgrep -v -f ~/hacked-string.txt example.php
I need the output to contain the <?php that's at the end of the line (sometimes it's a <style> tag), but the -v option inverts at the end of that line, so the output doesn't contain the <?php at the beginning.
NOTE
I've tried to use the -o or --only-matching which outputs nothing instead:
fgrep -f ~/hacked-string.txt example.php --only-matching -v
Is there another option in grep that I can use to invert on the end of the matched pattern, rather than the line where the pattern was matched? Or alternatively, is there an easier option to replace the hacked string in all .php files?
Here is a small snippet of what's in hacked-string.txt (line breaks added for readability):
]55Ld]55#*<%x5c%x7825bG9}:}.}-}!#*<%x55c%x7825)
dfyfR%x5c%x7827tfs%x5c%x7c%x785c%x5c%x7825j:^<!
%x5c%x7825w%x5c%x7860%x5c%x785c^>Ew:25tww**WYsb
oepn)%x5c%x7825bss-%x5c%x7825r%x5c%x7878B%x5c%x
7825h>#]y3860msvd},;uqpuft%x5c%x7860msvd}+;!>!}
%x5c%x7827;!%x5c%x7825V%x5c%x7827{ftmfV%x5e56+9
9386c6f+9f5d816:+946:ce44#)zbssb!>!ssbnpe_GMFT%
x5c5c%x782f#00#W~!%x5c%x7825t2w)##Qtjw)#]82#-#!
#-%x5c%x7825tmw)%x5c%x78w6*%x5c%x787f_*#fubfsdX
k5%x5c%xf2!>!bssbz)%x5c%x7824]25%x5c%x7824-8257
-K)fujs%x5c%x7878X6<#o]o]Y%x5c%x78257;utpI#7>-1
-bubE{h%x5c%x7825)sutcvt)!gj!|!*bubEpqsut>j%x5c
%x7825!*72!%x5c%x7827!hmg%x5c%x78225>2q%x5c%x7
Thanks in advance!
I think what you are asking is this:
"Is it possible to use the grep utility to remove all instances of a fixed string (which might contain lots of regex metacharacters) from a file?"
In that case, the answer is "No".
What I think you wanted to ask was:
"What is the easiest way to remove all instances of a fixed string (which might contain lots of regex metacharacters) from a file?"
Here's one reasonably simple solution:
delete_string() {
awk -v s="$the_string" '{while(i=index($0,s))$0=substr($0,1,i-1)substr($0,i+length(s))}1'
}
delete_string 'some_hideous_string_with*!"_inside' < original_file > new_file
The shell syntax is slightly fragile; it will break if the string contains an apostrophe ('). However, you can read a raw string from stdin into a variable with:
$ IFS= read -r the_string
absolutely anything here
which will work with any string which doesn't contain a newline or a NUL character. Once you have the string in a variable, you can use the above function:
delete_string "$the_string" < original_file > new_file
Here's another possible one liner, using python:
delete_string() {
python -c 'import sys;[sys.stdout.write(l.replace(r"""'"$1"'""","")) for l in sys.stdin]'
}
This won't handle strings which have three consecutive quotes (""").
Is the hacked string the same in every file?
If the length of hacked string in chars was 1234 then you can use
tail -c +1235 file.php > fixed-file.php
for each infected file.
Note that tail c +1235 tells to start output at 1235th character of the input file.
With perl:
perl -i.hacked -pe "s/\Q$(<hacked-string.txt)\E//g" example.php
Notes:
The $(<file) bit is a bash shortcut to read the contents of a file.
The \Q and \E bits are from perl, they treat the stuff in between as plain characters, ignoring regex metachars.
The -i.hacked option will edit the file in-place, creating a backup "example.php.hacked"

using sed to copy lines and delete characters from the duplicates

I have a file that looks like this:
#"Afghanistan.png",
#"Albania.png",
#"Algeria.png",
#"American_Samoa.png",
I want it to look like this
#"Afghanistan.png",
#"Afghanistan",
#"Albania.png",
#"Albania",
#"Algeria.png",
#"Algeria",
#"American_Samoa.png",
#"American_Samoa",
I thought I could use sed to do this but I can't figure out how to store something in a buffer and then modify it.
Am I even using the right tool?
Thanks
You don't have to get tricky with regular expressions and replacement strings: use sed's p command to print the line intact, then modify the line and let it print implicitly
sed 'p; s/\.png//'
Glenn jackman's response is OK, but it also doubles the rows which do not match the expression.
This one, instead, doubles only the rows which matched the expression:
sed -n 'p; s/\.png//p'
Here, -n stands for "print nothing unless explicitely printed", and the p in s/\.png//p forces the print if substitution was done, but does not force it otherwise
That is pretty easy to do with sed and you not even need to use the hold space (the sed auxiliary buffer). Given the input file below:
$ cat input
#"Afghanistan.png",
#"Albania.png",
#"Algeria.png",
#"American_Samoa.png",
you should use this command:
sed 's/#"\([^.]*\)\.png",/&\
#"\1",/' input
The result:
$ sed 's/#"\([^.]*\)\.png",/&\
#"\1",/' input
#"Afghanistan.png",
#"Afghanistan",
#"Albania.png",
#"Albania",
#"Algeria.png",
#"Algeria",
#"American_Samoa.png",
#"American_Samoa",
This commands is just a replacement command (s///). It matches anything starting with #" followed by non-period chars ([^.]*) and then by .png",. Also, it matches all non-period chars before .png", using the group brackets \( and \), so we can get what was matched by this group. So, this is the to-be-replaced regular expression:
#"\([^.]*\)\.png",
So follows the replacement part of the command. The & command just inserts everything that was matched by #"\([^.]*\)\.png", in the changed content. If it was the only element of the replacement part, nothing would be changed in the output. However, following the & there is a newline character - represented by the backslash \ followed by an actual newline - and in the new line we add the #" string followed by the content of the first group (\1) and then the string ",.
This is just a brief explanation of the command. Hope this helps. Also, note that you can use the \n string to represent newlines in some versions of sed (such as GNU sed). It would render a more concise and readable command:
sed 's/#"\([^.]*\)\.png",/&\n#"\1",/' input
I prefer this over Carles Sala and Glenn Jackman's:
sed '/.png/p;s/.png//'
Could just say it's personal preference.
or one can combine both versions and apply the duplication only on lines matching the required pattern
sed -e '/^#".*\.png",/{p;s/\.png//;}' input