give a file without changing the name in script [duplicate] - bash

Question

This question already has answers here:
How to pass parameters to a Bash script?
(4 answers)
Closed 1 year ago.
At the beginning I have a file.txt, which contains several informations that I will take using the grep command as you see in the script.
What I want is to give the script the file I want instead of file.txt but without changing the file name each time in the script for example if the file is named Me.txt I don’t want to go into the script and write Me.txt in each grep command especially if I have dozens of orders.
Is there a way to do this?
#!/bin/bash
grep teste file.txt > testline.txt
awk '{print $2}' testline.txt > test.txt
echo '#'
echo '#'
grep remote file.txt > remoteline.txt
awk '{print $3}' remoteline.txt > remote.txt
echo '#'
echo '#'
grep adresse file.txt > adresseline.txt
awk '{print $2}' adresseline.txt > adresse.txt

Answer 1

Using a parameter, as many contributors here suggested, is of course the obvious approach, and the one which is usually taken in such case, so I want to extend this idea:
If you do it naively as
filename=$1
you have to supply the name on every invocation. You can improve on this by providing a default value for the case the parameter is missing:
filename=${1:-file.txt}
But sometimes you are in a situation, where for some time (working on a specific task), you always need the same filename over and over, and the default value happens to be not the one you need. Another possibility to pass information to a program is via the environment. If you set the filename by
filename=${MOOFOO:-file.txt}
it means that - assuming your script is called myscript.sh - if you invoke your script by
MOOFOO=myfile.txt myscript.sh
it uses myfile.txt, while if you call it by
myscript.sh
it uses the default file.txt. You can also set MOOFOO in your shell, as
export MOOFOO=myfile.txt
and then, even a lone execution of
myscript.sh
with use myfile.txt instead of the default file.txt
The most flexible approach is to combine both, and this is what I often do in such a situation. If you do in your script a
filename=${1:-${MOOFOO:-file.txt}}
it takes the name from the 1st parameter, but if there is no parameter, takes it from the variable MOOFOO, and if this variable is also undefined, uses file.txt as the last fallback.

Answer 2

You should pass the filename as a command line parameter so that you can call your script like so:
script <filename>
Inside the script, you can access the command line parameters in the variables $1, $2,.... The variable $# contains the number of command line parameters passed to the script, and the variable $0 contains the path of the script itself.
As with all variables, you can choose to put the variable name in curly brackets which has advantages sometimes: ${1}, ${2}, ...
#!/bin/bash
if [ $# = 1 ]; then
filename=${1}
else
echo "USAGE: $(basename ${0}) <filename>"
exit 1
fi
grep teste "${filename}" > testline.txt
awk '{print $2}' testline.txt > test.txt
echo '#'
echo '#'
grep remote "${filename}" > remoteline.txt
awk '{print $3}' remoteline.txt > remote.txt
echo '#'
echo '#'
grep adresse "${filename}" > adresseline.txt
awk '{print $2}' adresseline.txt > adresse.txt
By the way, you don't need two different files to achieve what you want, you can just pipe the output of grep straight into awk, e.g.:
grep teste "${filename}" | awk '{print $2}' > test.txt
but then again, awk can do the regex match itself, reducing it all to just one command:
awk '/teste/ {print $2}' "${filename}" > test.txt