How do I get rid of “--” line separator when using grep - bash

I'm using the commands given below for splitting my fastq file into two separate paired end reads files:
grep '#.*/1' -A 3 24538_7#2.fq >24538_7#2_1.fq
grep '#.*/2' -A 3 24538_7#2.fq >24538_7#2_2.fq
But it's automatically introducing a -- line separator between the entries. Hence, making my fastq file inappropriate for further processing(because it then becomes an invalid fastq format).
So, I want to get rid of the line separator(--).
PS: I've found the answer for Linux machine but I'm using MacOS, and those didn't work on Mac terminal.

You can use the --no-group-separator option to suppress it (in GNU grep).
Alternatively, you could use (GNU) sed:
sed '\|#.*/1|,+3!d'
deletes all lines other than the one matching #.*/1 and the next three lines.
For macOS sed, you could use
sed -n '\|#.*/1|{N;N;N;p;}'
but this gets unwieldy quickly for more context lines.

Another approach would be to chain grep with itself:
grep '#.*/1' -A 3 file.fq | grep -v "^--"
The second grep selects non-matching (-v) lines that start with -- (though this pattern can sometimes be interpreted as a command line option, requiring some weird escaping like "[-][-]", which is why i put the ^ there).

Related

Remove first two characters from a column in a text file excluding the headers

I want to remove the first two characters of a column in a text file.
I am using the below but this is also truncating the headers.
sed -i 's/^..//' file1.txt
Below is my file:
FileName,Age
./Acct_Bal_Tgt.txt,7229
./IDQ_HB1.txt,5367
./IDQ_HB_LOGC.txt,5367
./IDQ_HB.txt,5367
./IGC_IDQ.txt,5448
./JobSchedule.txt,3851
I want the ./ to be removed from each line in the file name.
Transferring comments to an answer, as requested.
Modify your script to:
sed -e '2,$s/^..//' file1.txt
The 2,$ prefix limits the change to lines 2 to the end of the file, leaving line 1 unchanged.
An alternative is to remove . and / as the first two characters on a line:
sed -e 's%^[.]/%%' file1.txt
I tend to use -e to specify that the script option follows; it isn't necessary unless you split the script over several arguments (so it isn't necessary here where there's just one argument for the script). You could use \. instead of [.]; I'm allergic to backslashes (as you would be if you ever spent time working out whether you needed 8 or 16 consecutive backslashes to get the right result in a troff document).
Advice: Don't use the -i option until you've got your script working correctly. It overwrites your file with the incorrect output just as happily as it will with the correct output. Consequently, if you're asking about how to write a sed script on SO, it isn't safe to be using the -i option. Also note that the -i option is non-standard and behaves differently with different versions of sed (when it is supported at all). Specifically, on macOS, the BSD sed requires a suffix specified; if you don't want a backup, you have to use two arguments: -i ''.
Use this Perl one-liner:
perl -pe 's{^[.]/}{}' file1.txt > output.txt
The Perl one-liner uses these command line flags:
-e : Tells Perl to look for code in-line, instead of in a file.
-p : Loop over the input one line at a time, assigning it to $_ by default. Add print $_ after each loop iteration.
s{^[.]/}{} : Replace a literal dot ([.]) followed by a slash ('/'), found at the beginning of the line (^), with nothing (delete them). This does not modify the header since it does not match the regex.
If you prefer to modify the file in-place, you can use this:
perl -i.bak -pe 's{^[.]/}{}' file1.txt
This creates the backup file file1.txt.bak.
SEE ALSO:
perldoc perlrun: how to execute the Perl interpreter: command line switches
perldoc perlrequick: Perl regular expressions quick start

Sed through files without using for loop?

I have a small script which basically generates a menu of all the scripts in my ~/scripts folder and next to each of them displays a sentence describing it, that sentence being the third line within the script commented out. I then plan to pipe this into fzf or dmenu to select it and start editing it or whatever.
1 #!/bin/bash
2
3 # a script to do
So it would look something like this
foo.sh a script to do X
bar.sh a script to do Y
Currently I have it run a for loop over all the files in the scripts folder and then run sed -n 3p on all of them.
for i in $(ls -1 ~/scripts); do
echo -n "$i"
sed -n 3p "~/scripts/$i"
echo
done | column -t -s '#' | ...
I was wondering if there is a more efficient way of doing this that did not involve a for loop and only used sed. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks!
Instead of a loop that is parsing ls output + sed, you may try this awk command:
awk 'FNR == 3 {
f = FILENAME; sub(/^.*\//, "", f); print f, $0; nextfile
}' ~/scripts/* | column -t -s '#' | ...
Yes there is a more efficient way, but no, it doesn't only use sed. This is probably a silly optimization for your use case though, but it may be worthwhile nonetheless.
The inefficiency is that you're using ls to read the directory and then parse its output. For large directories, that causes lots of overhead for keeping that list in memory even though you only traverse it once. Also, it's not done correctly, consider filenames with special characters that the shell interprets.
The more efficient way is to use find in combination with its -exec option, which starts a second program with each found file in turn.
BTW: If you didn't rely on line numbers but maybe a tag to mark the description, you could also use grep -r, which avoids an additional process per file altogether.
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed -sn '1h;3{H;g;s/\n/ /p}' ~/scripts/*
Use the -s option to reset the line number addresses for each file.
Copy line 1 to the hold space.
Append line 3 to the hold space.
Swap the hold space for the pattern space.
Replace the newline with a space and print the result.
All files in the directory ~/scripts will be processed.
N.B. You may wish to replace the space delimiter by a tab or pipe the results to the column command.

Using both GNU Utils with Mac Utils in bash

I am working with plotting extremely large files with N number of relevant data entries. (N varies between files).
In each of these files, comments are automatically generated at the start and end of the file and would like to filter these out before recombining them into one grand data set.
Unfortunately, I am using MacOSx, where I encounter some issues when trying to remove the last line of the file. I have read that the most efficient way was to use head/tail bash commands to cut off sections of data. Since head -n -1 does not work for MacOSx I had to install coreutils through homebrew where the ghead command works wonderfully. However the command,
tail -n+9 $COUNTER/test.csv | ghead -n -1 $COUNTER/test.csv >> gfinal.csv
does not work. A less than pleasing workaround was I had to separate the commands, use ghead > newfile, then use tail on newfile > gfinal. Unfortunately, this will take while as I have to write a new file with the first ghead.
Is there a workaround to incorporating both GNU Utils with the standard Mac Utils?
Thanks,
Keven
The problem with your command is that you specify the file operand again for the ghead command, instead of letting it take its input from stdin, via the pipe; this causes ghead to ignore stdin input, so the first pipe segment is effectively ignored; simply omit the file operand for the ghead command:
tail -n+9 "$COUNTER/test.csv" | ghead -n -1 >> gfinal.csv
That said, if you only want to drop the last line, there's no need for GNU head - OS X's own BSD sed will do:
tail -n +9 "$COUNTER/test.csv" | sed '$d' >> gfinal.csv
$ matches the last line, and d deletes it (meaning it won't be output).
Finally, as #ghoti points out in a comment, you could do it all using sed:
sed -n '9,$ {$!p;}' file
Option -n tells sed to only produce output when explicitly requested; 9,$ matches everything from line 9 through (,) the end of the file (the last line, $), and {$!p;} prints (p) every line in that range, except (!) the last ($).
I realize that your question is about using head and tail, but I'll answer as if you're interested in solving the original problem rather than figuring out how to use those particular tools to solve the problem. :)
One method using sed:
sed -e '1,8d;$d' inputfile
At this level of simplicity, GNU sed and BSD sed both work the same way. Our sed script says:
1,8d - delete lines 1 through 8,
$d - delete the last line.
If you decide to generate a sed script like this on-the-fly, beware of your quoting; you will have to escape the dollar sign if you put it in double quotes.
Another method using awk:
awk 'NR>9{print last} NR>1{last=$0}' inputfile
This works a bit differently in order to "recognize" the last line, capturing the previous line and printing after line 8, and then NOT printing the final line.
This awk solution is a bit of a hack, and like the sed solution, relies on the fact that you only want to strip ONE final line of the file.
If you want to strip more lines than one off the bottom of the file, you'd probably want to maintain an array that would function sort of as a buffered FIFO or sliding window.
awk -v striptop=8 -v stripbottom=3 '
{ last[NR]=$0; }
NR > striptop*2 { print last[NR-striptop]; }
{ delete last[NR-striptop]; }
END { for(r in last){if(r<NR-stripbottom+1) print last[r];} }
' inputfile
You specify how much to strip in variables. The last array keeps a number of lines in memory, prints from the far end of the stack, and deletes them as they are printed. The END section steps through whatever remains in the array, and prints everything not prohibited by stripbottom.

Insert line after match using sed

For some reason I can't seem to find a straightforward answer to this and I'm on a bit of a time crunch at the moment. How would I go about inserting a choice line of text after the first line matching a specific string using the sed command. I have ...
CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"
CLIENTFILE="bar"
And I want insert a line after the CLIENTSCRIPT= line resulting in ...
CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"
CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"
CLIENTFILE="bar"
Try doing this using GNU sed:
sed '/CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/a CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' file
if you want to substitute in-place, use
sed -i '/CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/a CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' file
Output
CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"
CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"
CLIENTFILE="bar"
Doc
see sed doc and search \a (append)
Note the standard sed syntax (as in POSIX, so supported by all conforming sed implementations around (GNU, OS/X, BSD, Solaris...)):
sed '/CLIENTSCRIPT=/a\
CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' file
Or on one line:
sed -e '/CLIENTSCRIPT=/a\' -e 'CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' file
(-expressions (and the contents of -files) are joined with newlines to make up the sed script sed interprets).
The -i option for in-place editing is also a GNU extension, some other implementations (like FreeBSD's) support -i '' for that.
Alternatively, for portability, you can use perl instead:
perl -pi -e '$_ .= qq(CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"\n) if /CLIENTSCRIPT=/' file
Or you could use ed or ex:
printf '%s\n' /CLIENTSCRIPT=/a 'CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' . w q | ex -s file
Sed command that works on MacOS (at least, OS 10) and Unix alike (ie. doesn't require gnu sed like Gilles' (currently accepted) one does):
sed -e '/CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/a\'$'\n''CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' file
This works in bash and maybe other shells too that know the $'\n' evaluation quote style. Everything can be on one line and work in
older/POSIX sed commands. If there might be multiple lines matching the CLIENTSCRIPT="foo" (or your equivalent) and you wish to only add the extra line the first time, you can rework it as follows:
sed -e '/^ *CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/b ins' -e b -e ':ins' -e 'a\'$'\n''CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' -e ': done' -e 'n;b done' file
(this creates a loop after the line insertion code that just cycles through the rest of the file, never getting back to the first sed command again).
You might notice I added a '^ *' to the matching pattern in case that line shows up in a comment, say, or is indented. Its not 100% perfect but covers some other situations likely to be common. Adjust as required...
These two solutions also get round the problem (for the generic solution to adding a line) that if your new inserted line contains unescaped backslashes or ampersands they will be interpreted by sed and likely not come out the same, just like the \n is - eg. \0 would be the first line matched. Especially handy if you're adding a line that comes from a variable where you'd otherwise have to escape everything first using ${var//} before, or another sed statement etc.
This solution is a little less messy in scripts (that quoting and \n is not easy to read though), when you don't want to put the replacement text for the a command at the start of a line if say, in a function with indented lines. I've taken advantage that $'\n' is evaluated to a newline by the shell, its not in regular '\n' single-quoted values.
Its getting long enough though that I think perl/even awk might win due to being more readable.
A POSIX compliant one using the s command:
sed '/CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/s/.*/&\
CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"/' file
Maybe a bit late to post an answer for this, but I found some of the above solutions a bit cumbersome.
I tried simple string replacement in sed and it worked:
sed 's/CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/&\nCLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"/' file
& sign reflects the matched string, and then you add \n and the new line.
As mentioned, if you want to do it in-place:
sed -i 's/CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/&\nCLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"/' file
Another thing. You can match using an expression:
sed -i 's/CLIENTSCRIPT=.*/&\nCLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"/' file
Hope this helps someone
The awk variant :
awk '1;/CLIENTSCRIPT=/{print "CLIENTSCRIPT2=\"hello\""}' file
I had a similar task, and was not able to get the above perl solution to work.
Here is my solution:
perl -i -pe "BEGIN{undef $/;} s/^\[mysqld\]$/[mysqld]\n\ncollation-server = utf8_unicode_ci\n/sgm" /etc/mysql/my.cnf
Explanation:
Uses a regular expression to search for a line in my /etc/mysql/my.cnf file that contained only [mysqld] and replaced it with
[mysqld]
collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci
effectively adding the collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci line after the line containing [mysqld].
I had to do this recently as well for both Mac and Linux OS's and after browsing through many posts and trying many things out, in my particular opinion I never got to where I wanted to which is: a simple enough to understand solution using well known and standard commands with simple patterns, one liner, portable, expandable to add in more constraints. Then I tried to looked at it with a different perspective, that's when I realized i could do without the "one liner" option if a "2-liner" met the rest of my criteria. At the end I came up with this solution I like that works in both Ubuntu and Mac which i wanted to share with everyone:
insertLine=$(( $(grep -n "foo" sample.txt | cut -f1 -d: | head -1) + 1 ))
sed -i -e "$insertLine"' i\'$'\n''bar'$'\n' sample.txt
In first command, grep looks for line numbers containing "foo", cut/head selects 1st occurrence, and the arithmetic op increments that first occurrence line number by 1 since I want to insert after the occurrence.
In second command, it's an in-place file edit, "i" for inserting: an ansi-c quoting new line, "bar", then another new line. The result is adding a new line containing "bar" after the "foo" line. Each of these 2 commands can be expanded to more complex operations and matching.

How do I alter the n-th line in multiple files using SED?

I have a series of text files that I want to convert to markdown. I want to remove any leading spaces and add a hash sign to the first line in every file. If I run this:
sed -i.bak '1s/ *\(.*\)/\#\1/g' *.md
It alters the first line of the first file and processes them all, leaving the rest of the files unchanged.
What am I missing that will search and replace something on the n-th line of multiple files?
Using bash on OSX 10.7
The problem is that sed by default treats any number of files as a single stream, and thus line-number offsets are relative to the start of the first file.
For GNU sed, you can use the -s (--separate) flag to modify this behavior:
sed -s -i.bak '1s/^ */#/' *.md
...or, with non-GNU sed (including the one on Mac OS X), you can loop over the files and invoke once per each:
for f in *.md; do sed -i.bak '1s/^ */#/' "$f"; done
Note that the regex is a bit simplified here -- no need to match parts of the line that you aren't going to change.
XARgs will do the trick for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xargs
Remove the *.md from the end of your sed command, then use XArgs to gather your files one at a time and send them to your sed command as a single entity, sorry I don't have time to work it out for you but the wikiPedia article should show you what you need to know.
sed -rsi.bak '1s/^/#/;s/^[ \t]+//' *.md
You don't need g(lobally) at the end of the command(s), because you wan't to replace something at the begin of line, and not multiple times.
You use two commands, one to modify line 1 (1s...), seperated from the second command for the leading blanks (and tabs? :=\t) with a semicolon. To remove blanks in the first line, switch the order:
sed -rsi.bak 's/^[ \t]+//;1s/^/#/' *.md
Remove the \t if you don't need it. Then you don't need a group either:
sed -rsi.bak 's/^ +//;1s/^/#/' *.md
-r is a flag to signal special treatment of regular expressions. You don't need to mask the plus in that case.

Resources