I'm trying to understand what's happening here out of curiosity, even though I can just copy and paste the output of the terminal to do what I need to do. The following command does not print anything.
ls /opt/local/var/macports/registry/portfiles -1 | sed 's/-.*//g' | sort -u | parallel "sudo port -N install" {} 2>&1 | grep -Po "Use '\K.*(?=')" | parallel "{}"
The directory I call ls on contains a bunch of filenames starting with the string I want to extract that ends at the first dash (so stringexample-4.2009 pipes stringexample into parallel (like xargs but to run each line separately). After running the command sudo port install <stringexample>, I get error outputs like so:
Unable to activate port <stringexample>. Use 'port -f activate <stringexample>' to force the activation.
Now, I wish to run port -f activate <stringexample>. However, I cannot seem to do anything with the output port -f activate gettext that I get to the terminal.
I cannot even do ... | grep -Po "Use '\K.*(?=')" | xargs echo or ... | grep -Po "Use '\K.*(?=')" >> commands_to_run.txt (the output stream to file only creates an empty file), despite the shorter part of the command:
ls /opt/local/var/macports/registry/portfiles -1 | sed 's/-.*//g' | sort -u | parallel "sudo port -N install {}" 2>&1 | grep -Po "Use '\K.*(?=')"
printing the commands to the terminal. Why does the pipe operator not work here? If the commands I wish to run are outputting to the terminal, surely there's got to be a way to capture them.
It works ok as a single tool:
curl "someURL"
curl -o - "someURL"
but it doesn't work in a pipeline:
curl "someURL" | tr -d '\n'
curl -o - "someURL" | tr -d '\n'
it returns:
(23) Failed writing body
What is the problem with piping the cURL output? How to buffer the whole cURL output and then handle it?
This happens when a piped program (e.g. grep) closes the read pipe before the previous program is finished writing the whole page.
In curl "url" | grep -qs foo, as soon as grep has what it wants it will close the read stream from curl. cURL doesn't expect this and emits the "Failed writing body" error.
A workaround is to pipe the stream through an intermediary program that always reads the whole page before feeding it to the next program.
E.g.
curl "url" | tac | tac | grep -qs foo
tac is a simple Unix program that reads the entire input page and reverses the line order (hence we run it twice). Because it has to read the whole input to find the last line, it will not output anything to grep until cURL is finished. Grep will still close the read stream when it has what it's looking for, but it will only affect tac, which doesn't emit an error.
For completeness and future searches:
It's a matter of how cURL manages the buffer, the buffer disables the output stream with the -N option.
Example:
curl -s -N "URL" | grep -q Welcome
Another possibility, if using the -o (output file) option - the destination directory does not exist.
eg. if you have -o /tmp/download/abc.txt and /tmp/download does not exist.
Hence, ensure any required directories are created/exist beforehand, use the --create-dirs option as well as -o if necessary
The server ran out of disk space, in my case.
Check for it with df -k .
I was alerted to the lack of disk space when I tried piping through tac twice, as described in one of the other answers: https://stackoverflow.com/a/28879552/336694. It showed me the error message write error: No space left on device.
You can do this instead of using -o option:
curl [url] > [file]
So it was a problem of encoding. Iconv solves the problem
curl 'http://www.multitran.ru/c/m.exe?CL=1&s=hello&l1=1' | iconv -f windows-1251 | tr -dc '[:print:]' | ...
If you are trying something similar like source <( curl -sS $url ) and getting the (23) Failed writing body error, it is because sourcing a process substitution doesn't work in bash 3.2 (the default for macOS).
Instead, you can use this workaround.
source /dev/stdin <<<"$( curl -sS $url )"
Trying the command with sudo worked for me. For example:
sudo curl -O -k 'https url here'
note: -O (this is capital o, not zero) & -k for https url.
I had the same error but from different reason. In my case I had (tmpfs) partition with only 1GB space and I was downloading big file which finally filled all memory on that partition and I got the same error as you.
I encountered the same problem when doing:
curl -L https://packagecloud.io/golang-migrate/migrate/gpgkey | apt-key add -
The above query needs to be executed using root privileges.
Writing it in following way solved the issue for me:
curl -L https://packagecloud.io/golang-migrate/migrate/gpgkey | sudo apt-key add -
If you write sudo before curl, you will get the Failed writing body error.
For me, it was permission issue. Docker run is called with a user profile but root is the user inside the container. The solution was to make curl write to /tmp since that has write permission for all users , not just root.
I used the -o option.
-o /tmp/file_to_download
In my case, I was doing:
curl <blabla> | jq | grep <blibli>
With jq . it worked: curl <blabla> | jq . | grep <blibli>
I encountered this error message while trying to install varnish cache on ubuntu. The google search landed me here for the error (23) Failed writing body, hence posting a solution that worked for me.
The bug is encountered while running the command as root curl -L https://packagecloud.io/varnishcache/varnish5/gpgkey | apt-key add -
the solution is to run apt-key add as non root
curl -L https://packagecloud.io/varnishcache/varnish5/gpgkey | apt-key add -
The explanation here by #Kaworu is great: https://stackoverflow.com/a/28879552/198219
This happens when a piped program (e.g. grep) closes the read pipe before the previous program is finished writing the whole page. cURL doesn't expect this and emits the "Failed writing body" error.
A workaround is to pipe the stream through an intermediary program that always reads the whole page before feeding it to the next program.
I believe the more correct implementation would be to use sponge, as already suggested by #nisetama in the comments:
curl "url" | sponge | grep -qs foo
I got this error trying to use jq when I didn't have jq installed. So... make sure jq is installed if you're trying to use it.
In Bash and zsh (and perhaps other shells), you can use process substitution (Bash/zsh) to create a file on the fly, and then use that as input to the next process in the pipeline chain.
For example, I was trying to parse JSON output from cURL using jq and less, but was getting the Failed writing body error.
# Note: this does NOT work
curl https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/ | jq | less
When I rewrote it using process substitution, it worked!
# this works!
jq "" <(curl https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/) | less
Note: jq uses its 2nd argument to specify an input file
Bonus: If you're using jq like me and want to keep the colorized output in less, use the following command line instead:
jq -C "" <(curl https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/) | less -r
(Thanks to Kowaru for their explanation of why Failed writing body was occurring. However, their solution of using tac twice didn't work for me. I also wanted to find a solution that would scale better for large files and tries to avoid the other issues noted as comments to that answer.)
I was getting curl: (23) Failed writing body . Later I noticed that I did not had sufficient space for downloading an rpm package via curl and thats the reason I was getting issue. I freed up some space and issue for resolved.
I had the same question because of my own typo mistake:
# fails because of reasons mentioned above
curl -I -fail https://www.google.com | echo $?
curl: (23) Failed writing body
# success
curl -I -fail https://www.google.com || echo $?
I added flag -s and it did the job. eg: curl -o- -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.1/install.sh | bash
I am trying to install zfs through shell script while installation I am getting some error so, to automate it fully, I want to get the version to be installed from error itself. For all other commands I am getting the error in one variable but for one command its not coming at all. I tried every solution possible.
I need output of this command
sploutput=$(sudo dkms install -m spl -v $version)
echo $sploutput
echo $sploutput # This is giving nothing.
I tried wrapping it around string also like "sploutput=$(sudo dkms install -m spl -v $version)"
echo "{sploutput}"
Nothing seems to work.
sploutput=$(sudo dkms install -m spl -v $version)
echo $sploutput
it might be because the dkms install outputs on STDERR and not on STDOUT, and with the command you're using, you're only getting STDOUT output in the variable. To take both, you can try:
sploutput=$(sudo dkms install -m spl -v $version 2>&1)
to redirect STDERR into STDOUT.
As per ZMO's answer: try running sudo dkms install -m spl -v $version
See, what is it returning? : STDERR or STDOUT.
In case, if it fails, it won't show up anything in sploutput.
It write only STDOUT to the variable.
Use 2>&1(to write Standard error to standard output).
You can refer IO redirection
You can use following:
sploutput=$(sudo dkms install -m spl -v $version 2>&1)
echo $sploutput
In the janus project, they use curl to download and pipe a bootstrap script into bash.
https://github.com/carlhuda/janus
It looks like this:
$ curl -Lo- https://bit.ly/janus-bootstrap | bash
Why would one want to use the args -Lo-?
-o is supposed to be for output, but wouldn't that happen anyway (i.e. to stdout)?
It's all in the man pages:
-L in case the page has moved (3xx response) curl will redirect the request to the new address
-o output to a file instead of stdout (usually the screen). In your case the o flag is redundant since the output is piped to bash (for execution) - not to a file.
The -o is redundant, they produce the exact same output:
$ curl --silent example.com | sha256sum
3587cb776ce0e4e8237f215800b7dffba0f25865cb84550e87ea8bbac838c423 *-
$ curl --silent --output - example.com | sha256sum
3587cb776ce0e4e8237f215800b7dffba0f25865cb84550e87ea8bbac838c423 *-
They have used that syntax since that line was first introduced in 2011.
You might ask Wael Nasreddine (#kalbasit on GitHub) why he did it. He
is still active on that repo.
I'm busy writing up a Capistrano deployment script for one of our applications. One of the steps installs RVM using the following command:
run "cat ~/rvm-installer.sh | bash -s stable --ruby"
However, I feel the output is too verbose, and I rather want to dump it into a .log file. Is it possible to redirect the output for the entire rvm-installer.sh script elsewhere?
Like this:
run "cat ~/rvm-installer.sh | bash -s stable --ruby >out.log"
or, if you want to redirect standard error stream of the process as well:
run "cat ~/rvm-installer.sh | bash -s stable --ruby >out.log 2>err.log"
you can also redirect everything to the same file:
run "cat ~/rvm-installer.sh | bash -s stable --ruby >out.log 2>&1"