I have two strings saved in a bash variable delimited by :. I want to get extract the second string, prepend that with THIS_VAR= and append it to a file named saved.txt
For example if myVar="abc:pqr", THIS_VAR=pqr should be appended to saved.txt.
This is what I have so far,
myVar="abc:pqr"
echo $myVar | cut -d ':' -f 2 >> saved.txt
How do I prepend THIS_VAR=?
printf 'THIS_VAR=%q\n' "${myVar#*:}"
See Shell Parameter Expansion and run help printf.
The more general solution in addition to #konsolebox's answer is piping into a compound statement, where you can perform arbitrary operations:
echo This is in the middle | {
echo This is first
cat
echo This is last
}
Related
I have this variable:
A="Some variable has value abc.123"
I need to extract this value i.e abc.123. Is this possible in bash?
Simplest is
echo "$A" | awk '{print $NF}'
Edit: explanation of how this works...
awk breaks the input into different fields, using whitespace as the separator by default. Hardcoding 5 in place of NF prints out the 5th field in the input:
echo "$A" | awk '{print $5}'
NF is a built-in awk variable that gives the total number of fields in the current record. The following returns the number 5 because there are 5 fields in the string "Some variable has value abc.123":
echo "$A" | awk '{print NF}'
Combining $ with NF outputs the last field in the string, no matter how many fields your string contains.
Yes; this:
A="Some variable has value abc.123"
echo "${A##* }"
will print this:
abc.123
(The ${parameter##word} notation is explained in §3.5.3 "Shell Parameter Expansion" of the Bash Reference Manual.)
Some examples using parameter expansion
A="Some variable has value abc.123"
echo "${A##* }"
abc.123
Longest match on " " space
echo "${A% *}"
Some variable has value
Longest match on . dot
echo "${A%.*}"
Some variable has value abc
Shortest match on " " space
echo "${A%% *}"
some
Read more Shell-Parameter-Expansion
The documentation is a bit painful to read, so I've summarised it in a simpler way.
Note that the '*' needs to swap places with the ' ' depending on whether you use # or %. (The * is just a wildcard, so you may need to take off your "regex hat" while reading.)
${A% *} - remove shortest trailing * (strip the last word)
${A%% *} - remove longest trailing * (strip the last words)
${A#* } - remove shortest leading * (strip the first word)
${A##* } - remove longest leading * (strip the first words)
Of course a "word" here may contain any character that isn't a literal space.
You might commonly use this syntax to trim filenames:
${A##*/} removes all containing folders, if any, from the start of the path, e.g.
/usr/bin/git -> git
/usr/bin/ -> (empty string)
${A%/*} removes the last file/folder/trailing slash, if any, from the end:
/usr/bin/git -> /usr/bin
/usr/bin/ -> /usr/bin
${A%.*} removes the last extension, if any (just be wary of things like my.path/noext):
archive.tar.gz -> archive.tar
How do you know where the value begins? If it's always the 5th and 6th words, you could use e.g.:
B=$(echo "$A" | cut -d ' ' -f 5-)
This uses the cut command to slice out part of the line, using a simple space as the word delimiter.
As pointed out by Zedfoxus here. A very clean method that works on all Unix-based systems. Besides, you don't need to know the exact position of the substring.
A="Some variable has value abc.123"
echo "$A" | rev | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | rev
# abc.123
More ways to do this:
(Run each of these commands in your terminal to test this live.)
For all answers below, start by typing this in your terminal:
A="Some variable has value abc.123"
The array example (#3 below) is a really useful pattern, and depending on what you are trying to do, sometimes the best.
1. with awk, as the main answer shows
echo "$A" | awk '{print $NF}'
2. with grep:
echo "$A" | grep -o '[^ ]*$'
the -o says to only retain the matching portion of the string
the [^ ] part says "don't match spaces"; ie: "not the space char"
the * means: "match 0 or more instances of the preceding match pattern (which is [^ ]), and the $ means "match the end of the line." So, this matches the last word after the last space through to the end of the line; ie: abc.123 in this case.
3. via regular bash "indexed" arrays and array indexing
Convert A to an array, with elements being separated by the default IFS (Internal Field Separator) char, which is space:
Option 1 (will "break in mysterious ways", as #tripleee put it in a comment here, if the string stored in the A variable contains certain special shell characters, so Option 2 below is recommended instead!):
# Capture space-separated words as separate elements in array A_array
A_array=($A)
Option 2 [RECOMMENDED!]. Use the read command, as I explain in my answer here, and as is recommended by the bash shellcheck static code analyzer tool for shell scripts, in ShellCheck rule SC2206, here.
# Capture space-separated words as separate elements in array A_array, using
# a "herestring".
# See my answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/71575442/4561887
IFS=" " read -r -d '' -a A_array <<< "$A"
Then, print only the last elment in the array:
# Print only the last element via bash array right-hand-side indexing syntax
echo "${A_array[-1]}" # last element only
Output:
abc.123
Going further:
What makes this pattern so useful too is that it allows you to easily do the opposite too!: obtain all words except the last one, like this:
array_len="${#A_array[#]}"
array_len_minus_one=$((array_len - 1))
echo "${A_array[#]:0:$array_len_minus_one}"
Output:
Some variable has value
For more on the ${array[#]:start:length} array slicing syntax above, see my answer here: Unix & Linux: Bash: slice of positional parameters, and for more info. on the bash "Arithmetic Expansion" syntax, see here:
https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/bash/manual/bash.html#Arithmetic-Expansion
https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/bash/manual/bash.html#Shell-Arithmetic
You can use a Bash regex:
A="Some variable has value abc.123"
[[ $A =~ [[:blank:]]([^[:blank:]]+)$ ]] && echo "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}" || echo "no match"
Prints:
abc.123
That works with any [:blank:] delimiter in the current local (Usually [ \t]). If you want to be more specific:
A="Some variable has value abc.123"
pat='[ ]([^ ]+)$'
[[ $A =~ $pat ]] && echo "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}" || echo "no match"
echo "Some variable has value abc.123"| perl -nE'say $1 if /(\S+)$/'
I'm writing a for loop in bash to run a command and I need to add a comma after one of my variables. I can't seem to do this without an extra space added. When I move "," right next to $bams then it outputs *.sorted,
#!/bin/bash
bams=*.sorted
for i in $bams
do echo $bams ","
done;
Output should be this:
'file1.sorted','file2.sorted','file3.sorted'
The eventual end goal is to be able to insert a list of files into a --flag in the format above. Not sure how to do that either.
First, a literal answer (if your goal were to generate a string of the form 'foo','bar','baz', rather than to run a program with a command line equivalent to somecommand --flag='foo','bar','baz', which is quite different):
shopt -s nullglob # generate a null result if no matches exist
printf -v var "'%s'," *.sorted # put list of files, each w/ a comma, in var
echo "${var%,}" # echo contents of var, with last comma removed
Or, if you don't need the literal single quotes (and if you're passing your result to another program on its command line with the single quotes being syntactic rather than literal, you absolutely don't want them):
files=( *.sorted ) # put *.sorted in an array
IFS=, # set the comma character as the field separator
somecommand --flag "${files[*]}" # run your program with the comma-separated list
try this -
lst=$( echo *.sorted | sed 's/ /,/g' ) # stack filenames with commas
echo $lst
if you really need the single-ticks around each filename, then
lst="'$( echo *.sorted | sed "s/ /','/g" )'" # commas AND quotes
#!/bin/bash
bams=*.sorted
for i in $bams
do flag+="${flag:+,}'$i'"
done
echo $flag
Say I have a string like
s1="sxfn://xfn.oxbr.ac.uk:8843/xfn/mech2?XFN=/castor/
xf.oxbr.ac.uk/prod/oxbr.ac.uk/disk/xf20.m.ac.uk/prod/v1.8/pienug_ib-2/reco_c21_dr3809_r35057.dst"
or
s2="sxfn://xfn.gla.ac.uk:8841/xfn/mech2?XFN=/castor/
xf.gla.ac.uk/space/disk1/prod/v1.8/pienug_ib-2/reco_c21_dr3809_r35057.dst"
and I want in my script to extract the last part starting from prod/ i.e. "prod/v1.8/pienug_ib-2/reco_c21_dr3809_r35057.dst". Note that $s1 contains two occurrences of "prod/".
What is the most elegant way to do this in bash?
Using BASH string manipulations you can do:
echo "prod/${s1##*prod/}"
prod/v1.8/pienug_ib-2/reco_c21_dr3809_r35057.dst
echo "prod/${s2##*prod/}"
prod/v1.8/pienug_ib-2/reco_c21_dr3809_r35057.dst
With awk (which is a little overpowered for this, but it may be helpful if you have a file full of these strings you need to parse:
echo "sxfn://xfn.gla.ac.uk:8841/xfn/mech2?XFN=/castor/xf.gla.ac.uk/space/disk1/prod/v1.8/pienug_ib-2/reco_c21_dr3809_r35057.dst" | awk -F"\/prod" '{print "/prod"$NF}'
That's splitting the string by '/prod' then printing out the '/prod' delimiter and the last token in the string ($NF)
sed can do it nicely:
s1="sxfn://xfn.oxbr.ac.uk:8843/xfn/mech2?XFN=/castor/xf.oxbr.ac.uk/prod/oxbr.ac.uk/disk/xf20.m.ac.uk/prod/v1.8/pienug_ib-2/reco_c21_dr3809_r35057.dst"
echo "$s1" | sed 's/.*\/prod/\/prod/'
this relies on the earger matching of the .* part up front.
I run a script with the param -A AA/BB . To get an array with AA and BB, i can do this.
INPUT_PARAM=(${AIRLINE_OPTION//-A / }) #get rid of the '-A ' in the begining
LIST=(${AIRLINES_PARAM//\// }) # split by '/'
Can we achieve this in a single line?
Thanks in advance.
One way
IFS=/ read -r -a LIST <<< "${AIRLINE_OPTION//-A /}"
This places the output from the parameter substitution ${AIRLINE_OPTION//-A /} into a "here-string" and uses the bash read built-in to parse this into an array. Splitting by / is achieved by setting the value of IFS to / for the read command.
LIST=( $(IFS=/; for x in ${AIRLINE_OPTION#-A }; do printf "$x "; done) )
This is a portable solution, but if your read supports -a and you don't mind portability then you should go for #1_CR's solution.
With awk, for example, you can create an array and store it in LIST variable:
$ LIST=($(awk -F"[\/ ]" '{print $2,$3}' <<< "-A AA/BB"))
Result:
$ echo ${LIST[0]}
AA
$ echo ${LIST[1]}
BB
Explanation
-F"[\/ ]" defines two possible field separators: a space or a slash /.
'{print $2$3}' prints the 2nd and 3rd fields based on those separators.
How to I concatenate stdin to a string, like this?
echo "input" | COMMAND "string"
and get
inputstring
A bit hacky, but this might be the shortest way to do what you asked in the question (use a pipe to accept stdout from echo "input" as stdin to another process / command:
echo "input" | awk '{print $1"string"}'
Output:
inputstring
What task are you exactly trying to accomplish? More context can get you more direction on a better solution.
Update - responding to comment:
#NoamRoss
The more idiomatic way of doing what you want is then:
echo 'http://dx.doi.org/'"$(pbpaste)"
The $(...) syntax is called command substitution. In short, it executes the commands enclosed in a new subshell, and substitutes the its stdout output to where the $(...) was invoked in the parent shell. So you would get, in effect:
echo 'http://dx.doi.org/'"rsif.2012.0125"
use cat - to read from stdin, and put it in $() to throw away the trailing newline
echo input | COMMAND "$(cat -)string"
However why don't you drop the pipe and grab the output of the left side in a command substitution:
COMMAND "$(echo input)string"
I'm often using pipes, so this tends to be an easy way to prefix and suffix stdin:
echo -n "my standard in" | cat <(echo -n "prefix... ") - <(echo " ...suffix")
prefix... my standard in ...suffix
There are some ways of accomplish this, i personally think the best is:
echo input | while read line; do echo $line string; done
Another can be by substituting "$" (end of line character) with "string" in a sed command:
echo input | sed "s/$/ string/g"
Why i prefer the former? Because it concatenates a string to stdin instantly, for example with the following command:
(echo input_one ;sleep 5; echo input_two ) | while read line; do echo $line string; done
you get immediatly the first output:
input_one string
and then after 5 seconds you get the other echo:
input_two string
On the other hand using "sed" first it performs all the content of the parenthesis and then it gives it to "sed", so the command
(echo input_one ;sleep 5; echo input_two ) | sed "s/$/ string/g"
will output both the lines
input_one string
input_two string
after 5 seconds.
This can be very useful in cases you are performing calls to functions which takes a long time to complete and want to be continuously updated about the output of the function.
You can do it with sed:
seq 5 | sed '$a\6'
seq 5 | sed '$ s/.*/\0 6/'
In your example:
echo input | sed 's/.*/\0string/'
I know this is a few years late, but you can accomplish this with the xargs -J option:
echo "input" | xargs -J "%" echo "%" "string"
And since it is xargs, you can do this on multiple lines of a file at once. If the file 'names' has three lines, like:
Adam
Bob
Charlie
You could do:
cat names | xargs -n 1 -J "%" echo "I like" "%" "because he is nice"
Also works:
seq -w 0 100 | xargs -I {} echo "string "{}
Will generate strings like:
string 000
string 001
string 002
string 003
string 004
...
The command you posted would take the string "input" use it as COMMAND's stdin stream, which would not produce the results you are looking for unless COMMAND first printed out the contents of its stdin and then printed out its command line arguments.
It seems like what you want to do is more close to command substitution.
http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Command-Substitution.html#Command-Substitution
With command substitution you can have a commandline like this:
echo input `COMMAND "string"`
This will first evaluate COMMAND with "string" as input, and then expand the results of that commands execution onto a line, replacing what's between the ‘`’ characters.
cat will be my choice: ls | cat - <(echo new line)
With perl
echo "input" | perl -ne 'print "prefix $_"'
Output:
prefix input
A solution using sd (basically a modern sed; much easier to use IMO):
# replace '$' (end of string marker) with 'Ipsum'
# the `e` flag disables multi-line matching (treats all lines as one)
$ echo "Lorem" | sd --flags e '$' 'Ipsum'
Lorem
Ipsum#no new line here
You might observe that Ipsum appears on a new line, and the output is missing a \n. The reason is echo's output ends in a \n, and you didn't tell sd to add a new \n. sd is technically correct because it's doing exactly what you are asking it to do and nothing else.
However this may not be what you want, so instead you can do this:
# replace '\n$' (new line, immediately followed by end of string) by 'Ipsum\n'
# don't forget to re-add the `\n` that you removed (if you want it)
$ echo "Lorem" | sd --flags e '\n$' 'Ipsum\n'
LoremIpsum
If you have a multi-line string, but you want to append to the end of each individual line:
$ ls
foo bar baz
$ ls | sd '\n' '/file\n'
bar/file
baz/file
foo/file
I want to prepend my sql script with "set" statement before running it.
So I echo the "set" instruction, then pipe it to cat. Command cat takes two parameters : STDIN marked as "-" and my sql file, cat joins both of them to one output. Next I pass the result to mysql command to run it as a script.
echo "set #ZERO_PRODUCTS_DISPLAY='$ZERO_PRODUCTS_DISPLAY';" | cat - sql/test_parameter.sql | mysql
p.s. mysql login and password stored in .my.cnf file