Read first token from output - bash

I have this command:
num_lines="$(wc -l "$HOME/my_bash_history")"
Which yields:
17 /Users/alex/my_bash_history
So I tried to get the first token using:
local read num_lines < <(wc -l "$HOME/my_bash_history")
But all I get is empty result:
num lines:
Anybody know why?

wc reports the file name unless it is reading from stdin. So, keep it simple, just use:
$ num_lines="$(wc -l <"$HOME/my_bash_history")"
$ echo "$num_lines"
17
If you really want to use read with process substitution, then use two arguments to read like this:
$ read num_lines fname < <(wc -l "$HOME/my_bash_history")
$ echo "$num_lines"
17
or, use a here-string like this:
$ read num_lines fname <<<"$(wc -l "$HOME/my_bash_history")"
$ echo "$num_lines"
17
When read reads a line, the shell first splits the lines into words. The words are assigned to each argument in turn with the last argument receiving whatever remains. In our case, this means the the number is assigned to num_lines and whatever words follow the number are assigned to fname.

try this:
num_lines="$(wc -l $HOME/my_bash_history)"
echo "${num_lines%% *}"
explanation
${num_lines%% *} # delete all after first blank

Related

how to assign each of multiple lines in a file as different variable?

this is probably a very simple question. I looked at other answers but couldn't come up with a solution. I have a 365 line date file. file as below,
01-01-2000
02-01-2000
I need to read this file line by line and assign each day to a separate variable. like this,
d001=01-01-2000
d002=02-01-2000
I tried while read commands but couldn't get them to work.It takes a lot of time to shoot one by one. How can I do it quickly?
Trying to create named variable out of an associative array, is time waste and not supported de-facto. Better use this, using an associative array:
#!/bin/bash
declare -A array
while read -r line; do
printf -v key 'd%03d' $((++c))
array[$key]=$line
done < file
Output
for i in "${!array[#]}"; do echo "key=$i value=${array[$i]}"; done
key=d001 value=01-01-2000
key=d002 value=02-01-2000
Assumptions:
an array is acceptable
array index should start with 1
Sample input:
$ cat sample.dat
01-01-2000
02-01-2000
03-01-2000
04-01-2000
05-01-2000
One bash/mapfile option:
unset d # make sure variable is not currently in use
mapfile -t -O1 d < sample.dat # load each line from file into separate array location
This generates:
$ typeset -p d
declare -a d=([1]="01-01-2000" [2]="02-01-2000" [3]="03-01-2000" [4]="04-01-2000" [5]="05-01-2000")
$ for i in "${!d[#]}"; do echo "d[$i] = ${d[i]}"; done
d[1] = 01-01-2000
d[2] = 02-01-2000
d[3] = 03-01-2000
d[4] = 04-01-2000
d[5] = 05-01-2000
In OP's code, references to $d001 now become ${d[1]}.
A quick one-liner would be:
eval $(awk 'BEGIN{cnt=0}{printf "d%3.3d=\"%s\"\n",cnt,$0; cnt++}' your_file)
eval makes the shell variables known inside your script or shell. Use echo $d000 to show the first one of the newly defined variables. There should be no shell special characters (like * and $) inside your_file. Remove eval $() to see the result of the awk command. The \" quoted %s is to allow spaces in the variable values. If you don't have any spaces in your_file you can remove the \" before and after %s.

Bash Interpreter read

#!/bin/bash
read k
read m
read fileName
head -n -$k $fileName | tail -n +$m $fileName
Hi, this is what I have now. I have to create bash interpreter that removes the lines from head and removes lines from tail in text file.
I have to excute this bash interpreter by this way.
./strip.sh 2 3 hi.txt > bye.txt
How do I read 2 for k and 3 for m?
Also how do I read hi.txt for fileName?
Also is my code correct?
Please answer these question. I am really new to this bash interpreter.
Thank you.
read is for reading values from standard input. What you want are positional parameters:
k=$1
m=$2
fileName=$3
head -n -$k "$fileName" | tail -n +$m
Drop the final argument of fileName from tail, because it will read from standard input (fed by the standard output of head), not a named file.
#chepner point you in the correct direction but the script as is at the moment does not work as you expected. If you want to try another approach:
#!/bin/bash
set -u
k=${1}
file=${3}
lines=$(wc -l < "${file}")
m=$[${lines}-${2}]
awk 'NR>'${k}' && NR<='${m} "${file}"
Where:
set -u: make undefined variables (such as missing params) stop the execution
$(wc -l < "${file}"): count the total lines of the file.
$[${lines}-${2}]: subtract from bottom lines desired (passed to remove from the total number of lines
awk 'NR>k && NR<=m': print (default awk behaviour) the lines > k and <= m

How to concatenate stdin and a string?

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

Setting a BASH environment variable directly in AWK (in an AWK one-liner)

I have a file that has two columns of floating point values. I also have a C program that takes a floating point value as input and returns another floating point value as output.
What I'd like to do is the following: for each row in the original, execute the C program with the value in the first column as input, and then print out the first column (unchanged) followed by the second column minus the result of the C program.
As an example, suppose c_program returns the square of the input and behaves like this:
$ c_program 4
16
$
and suppose data_file looks like this:
1 10
2 11
3 12
4 13
What I'd like to return as output, in this case, is
1 9
2 7
3 3
4 -3
To write this in really sketchy pseudocode, I want to do something like this:
awk '{print $1, $2 - `c_program $1`}' data_file
But of course, I can't just pass $1, the awk variable, into a call to c_program. What's the right way to do this, and preferably, how could I do it while still maintaining the "awk one-liner"? (I don't want to pull out a sledgehammer and write a full-fledged C program to do this.)
you just do everything in awk
awk '{cmd="c_program "$1; cmd|getline l;print $1,$2-l}' file
This shows how to execute a command in awk:
ls | awk '/^a/ {system("ls -ld " $1)}'
You could use a bash script instead:
while read line
do
FIRST=`echo $line | cut -d' ' -f1`
SECOND=`echo $line | cut -d' ' -f2`
OUT=`expr $SECOND \* 4`
echo $FIRST $OUT `expr $OUT - $SECOND`
done
The shell is a better tool for this using a little used feature. There is a shell variable IFS which is the Input Field Separator that sh uses to split command lines when parsing; it defaults to <Space><Tab><Newline> which is why ls foo is interpreted as two words.
When set is given arguments not beginning with - it sets the positional parameters of the shell to the contents of the arguments as split via IFS, thus:
#!/bin/sh
while read line ; do
set $line
subtrahend=`c_program $1`
echo $1 `expr $2 - $subtrahend`
done < data_file
Pure Bash, without using any external executables other than your program:
#!/bin/bash
while read num1 num2
do
(( result = $(c_program num2) - num1 ))
echo "$num1 $result"
done
As others have pointed out: awk is not not well equipped for this job. Here is a suggestion in bash:
#!/bin/sh
data_file=$1
while read column_1 column_2 the_rest
do
((result=$(c_program $column_1)-$column_2))
echo $column_1 $result "$the_rest"
done < $data_file
Save this to a file, say myscript.sh, then invoke it as:
sh myscript.sh data_file
The read command reads each line from the data file (which was redirected to the standard input) and assign the first 2 columns to $column_1 and $column_2 variables. The rest of the line, if there is any, is stored in $the_rest.
Next, I calculate the result based on your requirements and prints out the line based on your requirements. Note that I surround $the_rest with quotes to reserve spacing. Failure to do so will result in multiple spaces in the input file to be squeezed into one.

Capturing multiple line output into a Bash variable

I've got a script 'myscript' that outputs the following:
abc
def
ghi
in another script, I call:
declare RESULT=$(./myscript)
and $RESULT gets the value
abc def ghi
Is there a way to store the result either with the newlines, or with '\n' character so I can output it with 'echo -e'?
Actually, RESULT contains what you want — to demonstrate:
echo "$RESULT"
What you show is what you get from:
echo $RESULT
As noted in the comments, the difference is that (1) the double-quoted version of the variable (echo "$RESULT") preserves internal spacing of the value exactly as it is represented in the variable — newlines, tabs, multiple blanks and all — whereas (2) the unquoted version (echo $RESULT) replaces each sequence of one or more blanks, tabs and newlines with a single space. Thus (1) preserves the shape of the input variable, whereas (2) creates a potentially very long single line of output with 'words' separated by single spaces (where a 'word' is a sequence of non-whitespace characters; there needn't be any alphanumerics in any of the words).
Another pitfall with this is that command substitution — $() — strips trailing newlines. Probably not always important, but if you really want to preserve exactly what was output, you'll have to use another line and some quoting:
RESULTX="$(./myscript; echo x)"
RESULT="${RESULTX%x}"
This is especially important if you want to handle all possible filenames (to avoid undefined behavior like operating on the wrong file).
In case that you're interested in specific lines, use a result-array:
declare RESULT=($(./myscript)) # (..) = array
echo "First line: ${RESULT[0]}"
echo "Second line: ${RESULT[1]}"
echo "N-th line: ${RESULT[N]}"
In addition to the answer given by #l0b0 I just had the situation where I needed to both keep any trailing newlines output by the script and check the script's return code.
And the problem with l0b0's answer is that the 'echo x' was resetting $? back to zero... so I managed to come up with this very cunning solution:
RESULTX="$(./myscript; echo x$?)"
RETURNCODE=${RESULTX##*x}
RESULT="${RESULTX%x*}"
Parsing multiple output
Introduction
So your myscript output 3 lines, could look like:
myscript() { echo $'abc\ndef\nghi'; }
or
myscript() { local i; for i in abc def ghi ;do echo $i; done ;}
Ok this is a function, not a script (no need of path ./), but output is same
myscript
abc
def
ghi
Considering result code
To check for result code, test function will become:
myscript() { local i;for i in abc def ghi ;do echo $i;done;return $((RANDOM%128));}
1. Storing multiple output in one single variable, showing newlines
Your operation is correct:
RESULT=$(myscript)
About result code, you could add:
RCODE=$?
even in same line:
RESULT=$(myscript) RCODE=$?
Then
echo $RESULT $RCODE
abc def ghi 66
echo "$RESULT"
abc
def
ghi
echo ${RESULT#Q}
$'abc\ndef\nghi'
printf '%q\n' "$RESULT"
$'abc\ndef\nghi'
but for showing variable definition, use declare -p:
declare -p RESULT RCODE
declare -- RESULT="abc
def
ghi"
declare -- RCODE="66"
2. Parsing multiple output in array, using mapfile
Storing answer into myvar variable:
mapfile -t myvar < <(myscript)
echo ${myvar[2]}
ghi
Showing $myvar:
declare -p myvar
declare -a myvar=([0]="abc" [1]="def" [2]="ghi")
Considering result code
In case you have to check for result code, you could:
RESULT=$(myscript) RCODE=$?
mapfile -t myvar <<<"$RESULT"
declare -p myvar RCODE
declare -a myvar=([0]="abc" [1]="def" [2]="ghi")
declare -- RCODE="40"
3. Parsing multiple output by consecutives read in command group
{ read firstline; read secondline; read thirdline;} < <(myscript)
echo $secondline
def
Showing variables:
declare -p firstline secondline thirdline
declare -- firstline="abc"
declare -- secondline="def"
declare -- thirdline="ghi"
I often use:
{ read foo;read foo total use free foo ;} < <(df -k /)
Then
declare -p use free total
declare -- use="843476"
declare -- free="582128"
declare -- total="1515376"
Considering result code
Same prepended step:
RESULT=$(myscript) RCODE=$?
{ read firstline; read secondline; read thirdline;} <<<"$RESULT"
declare -p firstline secondline thirdline RCODE
declare -- firstline="abc"
declare -- secondline="def"
declare -- thirdline="ghi"
declare -- RCODE="50"
After trying most of the solutions here, the easiest thing I found was the obvious - using a temp file. I'm not sure what you want to do with your multiple line output, but you can then deal with it line by line using read. About the only thing you can't really do is easily stick it all in the same variable, but for most practical purposes this is way easier to deal with.
./myscript.sh > /tmp/foo
while read line ; do
echo 'whatever you want to do with $line'
done < /tmp/foo
Quick hack to make it do the requested action:
result=""
./myscript.sh > /tmp/foo
while read line ; do
result="$result$line\n"
done < /tmp/foo
echo -e $result
Note this adds an extra line. If you work on it you can code around it, I'm just too lazy.
EDIT: While this case works perfectly well, people reading this should be aware that you can easily squash your stdin inside the while loop, thus giving you a script that will run one line, clear stdin, and exit. Like ssh will do that I think? I just saw it recently, other code examples here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/24260/reading-lines-from-a-file-with-bash-for-vs-while
One more time! This time with a different filehandle (stdin, stdout, stderr are 0-2, so we can use &3 or higher in bash).
result=""
./test>/tmp/foo
while read line <&3; do
result="$result$line\n"
done 3</tmp/foo
echo -e $result
you can also use mktemp, but this is just a quick code example. Usage for mktemp looks like:
filenamevar=`mktemp /tmp/tempXXXXXX`
./test > $filenamevar
Then use $filenamevar like you would the actual name of a file. Probably doesn't need to be explained here but someone complained in the comments.
How about this, it will read each line to a variable and that can be used subsequently !
say myscript output is redirected to a file called myscript_output
awk '{while ( (getline var < "myscript_output") >0){print var;} close ("myscript_output");}'

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