When awk splits a line into fields using a delimiter, it maintains the original line in the $0 variable. Thus it can print the original line (assuming nothing else modifies $0) after performing operations on the individual fields. Can bash's read do something similar, where it has not only the individual elements but also the entire line?
E.g., with the following input.txt
foo,bar
baz,quz
The awk behavior that i'm trying to imitate in bash is:
awk -F, '($1 == "baz") {print $0}' input.txt
This will print baz,quz because $0 is the whole line that was read, even though the line was also split into two fields ($1 and $2).
Bash:
while IFS=, read -r first second; do
if [[ "$first" == lemur ]]; then
# echo the entire line
fi
done < input.txt
In this simple case it wouldn't be too difficult to recreate the original line by echoing the $first and $second variables with a comma between them. But in more complex scenarios where IFS may be more than one character and there may be many fields, it becomes much harder to accurately recreate the original line unless bash is maintaining it during the read operation.
Probably you'll have to do it with 2 different reads like
while read -r line; do
IFS=, read first second <<<"$line"
if [[ $first == lemur ]]; then
printf '%s\n' "$line"
fi
done < input.txt
Related
I am attempting to return the line number of lines that have a break. An input example:
2938
383
3938
3
383
33333
But my script is not working and I can't see why. My script:
input="./input.txt"
declare -i count=0
while IFS= read -r line;
do
((count++))
if [ "$line" == $'\n\n' ]; then
echo "$count"
fi
done < "$input"
So I would expect, 3, 6 as output.
I just receive a blank response in the terminal when I execute. So there isn't a syntax error, something else is wrong with the approach I am taking. Bit stumped and grateful for any pointers..
Also "just use awk" doesn't help me. I need this structure for additional conditions (this is just a preliminary test) and I don't know awk syntax.
The issue is that "$line" == $'\n\n' won't match a newline as it won't be there after consuming an empty line from the input, instead you can match an empty line with regex pattern ^$:
if [[ "$line" =~ ^$ ]]; then
Now it should work.
It's also match easier with awk command:
$ awk '$0 == ""{ print NR }' test.txt
3
6
As Roman suggested, line read by read terminates with a delimiter, and that delimiter would not show up in the line the way you're testing for.
If the pattern you are searching for looks like an empty line (which I infer is how a "double newline" always manifests), then you can just test for that:
while read -r; do
((count++))
if [[ -z "$REPLY" ]]; then
echo "$count"
fi
done < "$input"
Note that IFS is for field-splitting data on lines, and since we're only interested in empty lines, IFS is moot.
Or if the file is small enough to fit in memory and you want something faster:
mapfile -t -O1 foo < i
declare -p foo
for n in "${!foo[#]}"; do
if [[ -z "${foo[$n]}" ]]; then
echo "$n"
fi
done
Reading the file all at once (mapfile) then stepping through an array may be easier on resources than stepping through a file line by line.
You can also just use GNU awk:
gawk -v RS= -F '\n' '{ print (i += NF); i += length(RT) - 1 }' input.txt
By using FS = ".+", it ensures only truly zero-length (i.e. $0 == "") line numbers get printed, while skipping rows consisting entirely of [[:space:]]'s
echo '2938
383
3938
3
383
33333' |
{m,g,n}awk -F'.+' '!NF && $!NF = NR'
3
6
This sed one-liner should do the job at once:
sed -n '/^$/=' input.txt
Simply writes the current line number (the = command) if the line read is empty (the /^$/ matches the empty line).
I have data file which I need to filter with bash script, see data example:
name=pencils
name=apples
value=10
name=rocks
value=3
name=tables
value=6
name=beds
name=cups
value=89
I need to group name value pairs like so apples=10, if current line starts with name and next line starts with name, first line should be omitted entirely. So result file should look like this:
apples=10
rocks=3
tables=6
cups=89
I came with this simple solution which works but is very slow, it takes 5 min to complete for file with 2000 lines.
VALUES=$(cat input.txt)
for x in $VALUES; do
if [[ -n $(echo $x | grep 'name=') ]]; then
name=$(echo $x | sed "s/name=//")
elif [[ -n $(echo $x | grep 'value=') ]]; then
value=$(echo $x | sed "s/value=//")
echo "${name}=${value}" >> output.txt
fi
done
I'm aware that this kind of task is not very suitable for bash, but script is already written and this is just small part of it.
How can I optimize this task in bash?
Do not run any commands in subshells, it slows your script a lot. You can do everything in the current shell.
#! /bin/bash
while IFS== read k v ; do
if [[ $k == name ]] ; then
name=$v
elif [[ $k == value ]] ; then
printf '%s=%s\n' "$name" "$v"
fi
done
There are three easy optimizations you can make that will greatly speed up the script without requiring a major rethink.
1. Replace for with while read
Loading input.txt into a string, and then looping over that string with for x in $VALUES is slow. It requires the whole file to be read into memory even though this task could be done in a streaming fashion, reading a line at a time.
A common replacement for for line in $(cat file) is while read line; do ... done < file. It turns out that loops are compound commands, and like the normal one-line commands we're used to, compound commands can have < and > redirections. Redirecting a file into a loop means that for the duration of the loop, stdin comes from the file. So if you call read line inside the loop then it will read one line each iteration.
while IFS= read -r x; do
if [[ -n $(echo $x | grep 'name=') ]]; then
name=$(echo $x | sed "s/name=//")
elif [[ -n $(echo $x | grep 'value=') ]]; then
value=$(echo $x | sed "s/value=//")
echo "${name}=${value}" >> output.txt
fi
done < input.txt
2. Redirect output outside loop
It's not just input that can be redirected. We can do the same thing for the >> output.txt redirection. Here's where you'll see the biggest speedup. When >> output.txt is inside the loop output.txt must be opened and closed every iteration, which is crazy slow. Moving it to the outside means it only needs to be opened once. Much, much faster.
while IFS= read -r x; do
if [[ -n $(echo $x | grep 'name=') ]]; then
name=$(echo $x | sed "s/name=//")
elif [[ -n $(echo $x | grep 'value=') ]]; then
value=$(echo $x | sed "s/value=//")
echo "${name}=${value}"
fi
done < input.txt > output.txt
3. Shell string processing
One final improvement is to use faster string processing. Calling grep requires forking a subprocess every time just to do a simple string split. It'd be a lot faster if we could do the string splitting using just shell constructs. Well, as it happens that's easy now that we've switched to read. read can do more than read whole lines; it can also split on a delimiter from the variable $IFS (inter-field separator).
while IFS='=' read -r key value; do
case "$key" in
name) name="$value";;
value) echo "$name=$value";;
fi
done < input.txt > output.txt
Further reading
BashFAQ/001 - How can I read a file (data stream, variable) line-by-line (and/or field-by-field)?
This explains why I have IFS= read -r in the first two iterations.
BashFAQ/024 - I set variables in a loop that's in a pipeline. Why do they disappear after the loop terminates? Or, why can't I pipe data to read?
cmd | while read; do ... done is another popular use of while read, but it has unique pitfalls.
BashFAQ/100 - How do I do string manipulations in bash?
More in-shell string processing options.
If you have performance issues do not use bash at all. Use a text processing tool like, for instance, awk:
$ awk -F= '{name = $2} $1 == "value" {print name "=" $2}' data.txt
apples=10
rocks=3
tables=6
cups=89
Explanation: -F= defines the field separator as character =. The first block is executed only if the first field of a line ($1) is equal to string value. It prints variable name followed by character = and the second field ($2). The second block is executed on each line and it stores the second field ($2) in variable name.
Normally, if your input resembles what you show, this should automatically skip the first line. Else, we can exclude it explicitly using a test on the NR variable which value is the line number, starting at 1:
awk -F= 'NR != 1 && $1 == "value" {print name "=" $2}
NR != 1 {name = $2}' data.txt
All this works on inputs like the one you show but not on inputs where you would have other types of lines or several value=... consecutive lines. If you really want to test that the name/value pair is on two consecutive lines we need something more. For instance, test if the first field is name and use another variable n to store the line number of the last encountered name=... line. With all these tests we can now put the 2 blocks in a slightly more intuitive order (but the opposite would work the same):
awk -F= 'NR != 1 && $1 == "name" {name = $2; n = NR}
NR != 1 && NR == n+1 && $1 == "value" {print name "=" $2}' data.txt
With awk there might be a more elegant solution but you can have:
awk 'BEGIN{RS="\n?name=";FS="\nvalue="} {if($2) printf "%s=%s\n",$1,$2}' inputs.txt
RS="\n?name=" says that the record separator is name=
FS="\nvalue=" says that the field separator for each record is value=
if($2) says to only proceed the printf is the second field exists
Okay, so I have a variable ($line) that is defined in the bash/shell script as
$line = "abc:123:def:345"
need to get this column2 = "123"
How do I extract the value of the 2nd column i.e. "123" and name it as a different variable which can be summed later on? I know you have to separate it based on the delimiter ':' but I don't know how to transfer to different variable whilst taking input from $line variable. I only ask this because for some weird reason my code reads the first line of text file BUT doesn't perform the awk on just the first line only so hence the sum is wrong.
FILE=$1
while read line
do
awk -F: '{summation += $3;}END{print summation;}'
done < $FILE
-code via shell script
Thanks.
You can use awk to get second field:
line="abc:123:def:345"
awk -F: '{print $2}' <<< "$line"
123
To assign a variable in the shell, no $ on the left-hand side, no spaces around the =, and < and > are not valid quote characters
line="abc:123:def:345"
In bash, you would do this:
IFS=: read -ra fields <<< "$line"
temporarily set IFS to a colon
use the $line variable as input to the read command (a here-string)
and read the values into the fields array.
Bash arrays are indexed starting from zero, so to extract the 2nd field:
echo "${fields[1]}" # => 123
way in bash using expr
Line2=$(expr $line : "[^:]*:\([^:]*\)")
or if the fields are always 3 characters
Line2=${line:4:3}
Using plain POSIX features:
#!/usr/bin/env sh
line='abc:123:def:345'
IFS=:
# Split line on IFS into arguments
set -- $line
printf %s\\n "$2"
Alternate method:
#!/usr/bin/env sh
line='abc:123:def:345'
# Strip out first column
a="${line#*:}"
# Strip out remaining columns except 1st
b="${a%%:*}"
printf %s\\n "$b"
Let's say you have the following input file
Some text. It may contain line
breaks.
Some other part of the text
Yet an other part of
the text
And you want to iterate each text part (seperated by two line breaks (\n\n)), so that
in the first iteration I would only get:
Some text. It may contain line
breaks.
In the second iteration I would get:
Some other part of the text
And in the last iteration I would get:
Yet an other part of
the text
I tried this, but it doesn't seem to work because IFS only supports one character?
cat $inputfile | while IFS=$'\n\n' read part; do
# do something with $part
done
This is the solution of anubhava in pure bash:
#!/bin/bash
COUNT=1; echo -n "$COUNT: "
while read LINE
do
[ "$LINE" ] && echo "$LINE" || { (( ++COUNT )); echo -n "$COUNT: " ;}
done
Use awk with null RS:
awk '{print NR ":", $0}' RS= file
1: Some Text. It may contains line
breaks.
2: Some Other Part of the Text
3: Yet an other Part of
the Text
You can clearly see that your input file has 3 records now (each record is printed with record # in output).
I'm trying to read file line by line in bash.
Every line has format as follows text|number.
I want to produce file with format as follows text,text,text etc. so new file would have just text from previous file separated by comma.
Here is what I've tried and couldn't get it to work :
FILENAME=$1
OLD_IFS=$IFSddd
IFS=$'\n'
i=0
for line in $(cat "$FILENAME"); do
array=(`echo $line | sed -e 's/|/,/g'`)
echo ${array[0]}
i=i+1;
done
IFS=$OLD_IFS
But this prints both text and number but in different format text number
here is sample input :
dsadadq-2321dsad-dasdas|4212
dsadadq-2321dsad-d22as|4322
here is sample output:
dsadadq-2321dsad-dasdas,dsadadq-2321dsad-d22as
What did I do wrong?
Not pure bash, but you could do this in awk:
awk -F'|' 'NR>1{printf(",")} {printf("%s",$1)}'
Alternately, in pure bash and without having to strip the final comma:
#/bin/bash
# You can get your input from somewhere else if you like. Even stdin to the script.
input=$'dsadadq-2321dsad-dasdas|4212\ndsadadq-2321dsad-d22as|4322\n'
# Output should be reset to empty, for safety.
output=""
# Step through our input. (I don't know your column names.)
while IFS='|' read left right; do
# Only add a field if it exists. Salt to taste.
if [[ -n "$left" ]]; then
# Append data to output string
output="${output:+$output,}$left"
fi
done <<< "$input"
echo "$output"
No need for arrays and sed:
while IFS='' read line ; do
echo -n "${line%|*}",
done < "$FILENAME"
You just have to remove the last comma :-)
Using sed:
$ sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/|[0-9]*\n*/,/g;s/,$//' file
dsadadq-2321dsad-dasdas,dsadadq-2321dsad-d22as
Alternatively, here is a bit more readable sed with tr:
$ sed 's/|.*$/,/g' file | tr -d '\n' | sed 's/,$//'
dsadadq-2321dsad-dasdas,dsadadq-2321dsad-d22as
Choroba has the best answer (imho) except that it does not handle blank lines and it adds a trailing comma. Also, mucking with IFS is unnecessary.
This is a modification of his answer that solves those problems:
while read line ; do
if [ -n "$line" ]; then
if [ -n "$afterfirst" ]; then echo -n ,; fi
afterfirst=1
echo -n "${line%|*}"
fi
done < "$FILENAME"
The first if is just to filter out blank lines. The second if and the $afterfirst stuff is just to prevent the extra comma. It echos a comma before every entry except the first one. ${line%|\*} is a bash parameter notation that deletes the end of a paramerter if it matches some expression. line is the paramter, % is the symbol that indicates a trailing pattern should be deleted, and |* is the pattern to delete.