How could I make a separate sed script (let's call it script.sed) that would display only the changed lines without having to use the -n option while executing it? (Sorry for my English)
I have a file called data2.txt with digits and I need to change the lines ending with ".5" and print those changed lines out in the console.
I know how to do it with a single command (sed -n 's/.5$//gp' data2.txt), however our university professor requires us to do the same using sed -f script.sed data2.txt command.
Any ideas?
The following should work for your sed script:
s/.5$//gp
d
The -n option will suppress automatic printing of the line, the other way to do that is to use the d command. From man page:
d Delete pattern space. Start next cycle.
This works because the automatic printing of the line happens at the end of a cycle, and using the d command means you never reach the end of a cycle so no lines are printed automatically.
This might work for you (GNU sed):
#n
s/.5$//p
Save this to a file and run as:
sed -f file.sed file.txt
Related
I would like to run a find and replace on an HTML file through the command line.
My command looks something like this:
sed -e s/STRING_TO_REPLACE/STRING_TO_REPLACE_IT/g index.html > index.html
When I run this and look at the file afterward, it is empty. It deleted the contents of my file.
When I run this after restoring the file again:
sed -e s/STRING_TO_REPLACE/STRING_TO_REPLACE_IT/g index.html
The stdout is the contents of the file, and the find and replace has been executed.
Why is this happening?
When the shell sees > index.html in the command line it opens the file index.html for writing, wiping off all its previous contents.
To fix this you need to pass the -i option to sed to make the changes inline and create a backup of the original file before it does the changes in-place:
sed -i.bak s/STRING_TO_REPLACE/STRING_TO_REPLACE_IT/g index.html
Without the .bak the command will fail on some platforms, such as Mac OSX.
An alternative, useful, pattern is:
sed -e 'script script' index.html > index.html.tmp && mv index.html.tmp index.html
That has much the same effect, without using the -i option, and additionally means that, if the sed script fails for some reason, the input file isn't clobbered. Further, if the edit is successful, there's no backup file left lying around. This sort of idiom can be useful in Makefiles.
Quite a lot of seds have the -i option, but not all of them; the posix sed is one which doesn't. If you're aiming for portability, therefore, it's best avoided.
sed -i 's/STRING_TO_REPLACE/STRING_TO_REPLACE_IT/g' index.html
This does a global in-place substitution on the file index.html. Quoting the string prevents problems with whitespace in the query and replacement.
use sed's -i option, e.g.
sed -i bak -e s/STRING_TO_REPLACE/REPLACE_WITH/g index.html
To change multiple files (and saving a backup of each as *.bak):
perl -p -i -e "s/\|/x/g" *
will take all files in directory and replace | with x
this is called a “Perl pie” (easy as a pie)
You should try using the option -i for in-place editing.
Warning: this is a dangerous method! It abuses the i/o buffers in linux and with specific options of buffering it manages to work on small files. It is an interesting curiosity. But don't use it for a real situation!
Besides the -i option of sed
you can use the tee utility.
From man:
tee - read from standard input and write to standard output and files
So, the solution would be:
sed s/STRING_TO_REPLACE/STRING_TO_REPLACE_IT/g index.html | tee | tee index.html
-- here the tee is repeated to make sure that the pipeline is buffered. Then all commands in the pipeline are blocked until they get some input to work on. Each command in the pipeline starts when the upstream commands have written 1 buffer of bytes (the size is defined somewhere) to the input of the command. So the last command tee index.html, which opens the file for writing and therefore empties it, runs after the upstream pipeline has finished and the output is in the buffer within the pipeline.
Most likely the following won't work:
sed s/STRING_TO_REPLACE/STRING_TO_REPLACE_IT/g index.html | tee index.html
-- it will run both commands of the pipeline at the same time without any blocking. (Without blocking the pipeline should pass the bytes line by line instead of buffer by buffer. Same as when you run cat | sed s/bar/GGG/. Without blocking it's more interactive and usually pipelines of just 2 commands run without buffering and blocking. Longer pipelines are buffered.) The tee index.html will open the file for writing and it will be emptied. However, if you turn the buffering always on, the second version will work too.
sed -i.bak "s#https.*\.com#$pub_url#g" MyHTMLFile.html
If you have a link to be added, try this. Search for the URL as above (starting with https and ending with.com here) and replace it with a URL string. I have used a variable $pub_url here. s here means search and g means global replacement.
It works !
The problem with the command
sed 'code' file > file
is that file is truncated by the shell before sed actually gets to process it. As a result, you get an empty file.
The sed way to do this is to use -i to edit in place, as other answers suggested. However, this is not always what you want. -i will create a temporary file that will then be used to replace the original file. This is problematic if your original file was a link (the link will be replaced by a regular file). If you need to preserve links, you can use a temporary variable to store the output of sed before writing it back to the file, like this:
tmp=$(sed 'code' file); echo -n "$tmp" > file
Better yet, use printf instead of echo since echo is likely to process \\ as \ in some shells (e.g. dash):
tmp=$(sed 'code' file); printf "%s" "$tmp" > file
And the ed answer:
printf "%s\n" '1,$s/STRING_TO_REPLACE/STRING_TO_REPLACE_IT/g' w q | ed index.html
To reiterate what codaddict answered, the shell handles the redirection first, wiping out the "input.html" file, and then the shell invokes the "sed" command passing it a now empty file.
I was searching for the option where I can define the line range and found the answer. For example I want to change host1 to host2 from line 36-57.
sed '36,57 s/host1/host2/g' myfile.txt > myfile1.txt
You can use gi option as well to ignore the character case.
sed '30,40 s/version/story/gi' myfile.txt > myfile1.txt
With all due respect to the above correct answers, it's always a good idea to "dry run" scripts like that, so that you don't corrupt your file and have to start again from scratch.
Just get your script to spill the output to the command line instead of writing it to the file, for example, like that:
sed -e s/STRING_TO_REPLACE/STRING_TO_REPLACE_IT/g index.html
OR
less index.html | sed -e s/STRING_TO_REPLACE/STRING_TO_REPLACE_IT/g
This way you can see and check the output of the command without getting your file truncated.
I want to extract the output of a command run through shell script in a variable but I am not able to do it. I am using grep command for the same. Please help me in getting the desired output in a variable.
x=$(pwd)
pw=$(grep '\(.*\)/bin' $x)
echo "extracted is:"
echo $pw
The output of the pwd command is /opt/abc/bin/ and I want only /root/abc part of it. Thanks in advance.
Use dirname to get the path and not the last segment of the path.
You can use:
x=$(pwd)
pw=`dirname $x`
echo $pw
Or simply:
pw=`dirname $(pwd)`
echo $pw
All of what you're doing can be done in a single echo:
echo "${PWD%/*}"
$PWD variable represents current directory and %/* removes last / and part after last /.
For your case it will output: /root/abc
The second (and any subsequent) argument to grep is the name of a file to search, not a string to perform matching against.
Furthermore, grep prints the matching line or (with -o) the matching string, not whatever the parentheses captured. For that, you want a different tool.
Minimally fixing your code would be
x=$(pwd)
pw=$(printf '%s\n' "$x" | sed 's%\(.*\)/bin.*%\1%')
(If you only care about Bash, not other shells, you could do sed ... <<<"$x" without the explicit pipe; the syntax is also somewhat more satisfying.)
But of course, the shell has basic string manipulation functions built in.
pw=${x%/bin*}
I am trying to parse an RSS feed on the Linux command line which involves formatting the raw output from the feed with sed.
I currently use this command:
feedstail -u http://www.heise.de/newsticker/heise-atom.xml -r -i 60 -f "{published}> {title} {link}" | sed 's/^\(.\{3\}\)\(.\{13\}\)\(.\{6\}\)\(.\{3\}\)\(.*\)/\1\3\5/'
This gives me a number of feed items per line that look like this:
Sat 20:33 GMT> WhatsApp-Ausfall: Server-Probleme blockieren Messaging-Dienst http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/WhatsApp-Ausfall-Server-Probleme-blockieren-Messaging-Dienst-2121664.html/from/atom10?wt_mc=rss.ho.beitrag.atom
Notice the long URL at the end. I want to shorten this to better fit on the command line. Therefore, I want to change my sed command to produce the following:
Sat 20:33 GMT> WhatsApp-Ausfall: Server-Probleme blockieren Messaging-Dienst http://www.heise.de/-2121664
That means cutting everything out of the URL except a dash and that seven digit number preceeding the ".html/blablabla" bit.
Currently my sed command only changes stuff in the date bit. It would have to leave the title and start or the URL alone and then cut stuff out of it until it reaches the seven digit number. It needs to preserve that and then cut everything after it out. Oh yeah, and we need to leave a dash right in front of that number too.
I have no idea how to do that and can't find the answer after hours of googling. Help?
EDIT:
This is the raw output of a line of feedstail -u http://www.heise.de/newsticker/heise-atom.xml -r -i 60 -f "{published}> {title} {link}", in case it helps:
Sat, 22 Feb 2014 20:33:00 GMT> WhatsApp-Ausfall: Server-Probleme blockieren Messaging-Dienst http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/WhatsApp-Ausfall-Server-Probleme-blockieren-Messaging-Dienst-2121664.html/from/atom10?wt_mc=rss.ho.beitrag.atom
EDIT 2:
It seems I can only pipe that output into one command. Piping it through multiple ones seems to break things. I don't understand why ATM.
Unfortunately (for me), I could only think of solving this with extended regexp syntax (either -E or -r flag on different systems):
... | sed -E 's|(://[^/]+/).*(-[0-9]+)\.html/.*|\1\2|'
UPDATE: In basic regexp syntax, the best I can do is
... | sed 's|\(://[^/]*/\).*\(-[0-9][0-9]*\)\.html/.*|\1\2|'
The key to writing this sort of regular expression is to be very careful about what the boundaries of what you expect are, so as to avoid the random gunk that you want to get rid of causing you problems. Also, you should bear in mind that you can use characters other than / as part of a s operation's delimiters.
sed 's!\(http://www\.heise\.de/\)newsticker/meldung/[^./]*\(-[0-9]+\)\.html[^ ]*!\1\2!'
Be aware that getting the RE right can be quite tricky; assume you'll need to test it! (This is a key part of the “now you have two problems” quote; REs very easily become horrendous.)
Something like this maybe?
... | awk -F'[^0-9]*' '{print "http://www.heise.de/-"$2}'
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed 's|\(//[^/]*/\).*\(-[0-9]\{7\}\).*|\1\2|' file
You can place the first sed command so:
feedstail -u http://www.heise.de/newsticker/heise-atom.xml -r -i 60 -f "{published}> {title} {link}" |
sed 's/^\(.\{3\}\)\(.\{13\}\)\(.\{6\}\)\(.\{3\}\)\(.*\)/\1\3\5/;s|\(//[^/]*/\).*\(-[0-9]\{7\}\).*|\1\2|'
How to use verbose flag in sed. Eg. If I'm deleting some lines using sed command then I want them to get displayed on a screen whichever lines are getting deleted. Also let me know if this can be done through a script?
Thanks in advance
sed doesn't have a verbose flag.
You can write a sed script that separates deleted lines from other lines, though. You can look at the deleted lines later, and decide whether deleting them was a good idea.
Here's an example. I want to delete from test.dat every line that starts with a number.
$ cat test.dat
1 First line
2 Second line
3 Third line
A Keep this one
Here's the sed script that will "do" the deleting. It looks for lines that start with a number, writes them to the file "deleted.dat", and then deletes them from the pattern space.
$ cat code/sed/delete-verbose.sed
/^[0-9]/{
w /home/myusername/deleted.dat
d
}
Here's what happens when you run it.
$ sed -f code/sed/delete-verbose.sed test.dat
A Keep this one
And here's what it wrote to "deleted.dat".
$ cat deleted.dat
1 First line
2 Second line
3 Third line
When you're confident the script is going to do the right thing, redirect output to another file, or edit the file in-place (-i option).
This might work for you (GNU sed);
sed -e '/pattern_to_delete/{w /dev/stderr' -e ';d}' input_file > output_file
There is no verbose flag but by sending the lines to be deleted to stderr the effect you require can be achieved.
Hi I am new to this forum. I want to use SED to replace an expression on even lines of a file. My problem is that I cannot think f how to save the changes in the original file (i.e, how to overwrite the changes in the file). I have tried with :
sed -n 'n;p;' filename | sed 's/aaa/bbb/'
but this does not save the changes. I appreciate your help on this.
Try :
sed -i '2~2 s/aaa/bbb/' filename
The -i option tells sed to work in place, so not to write the edited version to stout and leave the original file be, but to apply the changes to the file. The 2~2 portion is the address for the lines sed should apply the commands. 2~2 means edit only even lines. 1~2 would edit only odd lines. 5~6 would edit every fifth line, starting at line 5 etc...
#Mithrandir's answer is an excellent, correct and complete one.
I will just add that the m~n addressing method is a GNU sed extension that may not work everywhere. For example, not all Macs have GNU sed, as well as *BSD systems may not have it either.
So, if you have a file like the following one:
$ cat f
1 ab
2 ad
3 ab
4 ac
5 aa
6 da
7 aa
8 ad
9 aa
...here is a more universal solution:
$ sed '2,${s/a/#A#/g;n}' f
1 ab
2 #A#d
3 ab
4 #A#c
5 aa
6 d#A#
7 aa
8 #A#d
9 aa
What does it do? The address of the command is 2,$, which means it will be applied to all lines between the second one (2) and the last one ($). The command in fact are two commands, treated as one because they are grouped by brackets ({ and }). The first command is the replacement s/a/#A#/g. The second one is the n command, which gets, in the current iteration, the next line, appends it to the current pattern space. So the current iteration will print the current line plus the next line, and the next iteration will process the next next line. Since I started it at the 2nd line, I am doing this process at each even line.
Of course, since you want to update the original file, you should call it with the -i flag. I would note that some of those non-GNU seds require you to give a parameter to the -i flag, which will an extension to be append to a file name. This file name is the name of a generated backup file with the old content. (So, if you call, for example, sed -i.bkp s/a/b/ myfile.txt the file myfile.txt will be altered, but another file, called myfile.txt.bkp, will be created with the old content of myfile.txt.) Since a) it is required in some places and b) it is accepted in GNU sed and c) it is a good practice nonetheless (if something go wrong, you can reuse the backup), I recommend to use it:
$ ls
f
$ sed -i.bkp '2,${s/a/#A#/g;n}' f
$ ls
f f.bkp
Anyway, my answer is just a complement for some specific scenarios. I would use #Mithrandir's solution, even because I am a Linux user :)
This might work for you:
sed -i 'n;s/aaa/bbb/' file
Use sed -i to edit the file in place.