I have a question using grep / egrep in bash
Imagine I have the following lines in the file:
Good day
Hello World 23 a
Hi Hello World
Hello World
sdHello World
Hello Worldsss
The problem is to find the line with exact match of string: "Hello World"
I tried to use
grep -n "^Hello World$" file.txt
but it doesn't work giving an empty result
If you want to look for exact matches, rather than matching a regular expression, use -F to specify that you're searching for a fixed string.
And to make it match the whole line instead of a substring, use -x.
grep -n -F -x "Hello World" file.txt
But your ^Hello World$ regexp should have worked. If it's not matching,then the file may not contain what you think it does. One possibility is that it contains Windows CRLF newlines instead of Unix LF newlines. Use dos2unix file.txt to fix it.
Related
I have a file that contains one particular string many times. How can I print all occurrences of the string on the screen along with letters following that word till the next space is encountered.
Suppose a line contained:
example="123asdfadf" foo=bar
I want to print example="123asdfadf".
I had tried using less filename | grep -i "example=*" but it was printing the complete lines in which example appeared.
$ grep -o "example[^ ]*" foo
example="abc"
example="123asdfadf"
Since -o is only supported by GNU grep, a portable solution would be to use sed:
sed -n 's/.*\(example=[^[:space:]]*\).*/\1/p' file
I have the following IP addresses in a file
3.3.3.1
3.3.3.11
3.3.3.111
I am using this file as input file to another program. In that program it will grep each IP address. But when I grep the contents I am getting some wrong outputs.
like
cat testfile | grep -o 3.3.3.1
but I am getting output like
3.3.3.1
3.3.3.1
3.3.3.1
I just want to get the exact output. How can I do that with grep?
Use the following command:
grep -owF "3.3.3.1" tesfile
-o returns the match only and not the whole line.-w greps for whole words, meaning the match must be enclosed in non word chars like <space>, <tab>, ,, ; the start or the end of the line etc. It prevents grep from matching 3.3.3.1 out of 3.3.3.111.
-F greps for fixed strings instead of patterns. This prevents the . in the IP address to be interpreted as any char, meaning grep will not match 3a3b3c1 (or something like this).
To match whole words only, use grep -ow 3.3.3.1 testfile
UPDATE: Use the solution provided by hek2mgl as it is more robust.
You may use anhcors.
grep '^3\.3\.3\.1$' file
Since by default grep uses regex, you need to escape the dots in-order to make grep to match literal dot character.
I have a huge .txt file that I want all spaces, line-breaks, indentations etc removed. It should literally be one long string.
I tried
sed -i 's/\ //g' test.txt
but nothing happens
sed -n "s/[[:blank:]]//g;H
$ {x;s/\n//g;p;}"
The H than $ are needed if you want to include New line due to fact that sed treat by default line by line (so no new line inside a line). The -n and p are needed to avoid double display with use of H
Seems to work ok for me:
[~/Desktop]
==> cat test.txt
the quick brown fox
[~/Desktop]
==> sed -i "s/\ //g" test.txt
[~/Desktop]
==> cat test.txt
thequickbrownfox
Sometimes using " " directly is hard and especially when you use double quotes (which involves that bash will interpret the string before passing it to sed).
sed -i -e 's/\s//g' file.txt
... should work (it works for me). "\s" means all whitespace characters, and with single quotes '', for bash not to interpret it before you passing it to sed.
While you use cygwin I think your OS is windows, then you don't need to use bash to implement your goal. Just open your txt file with the text editor, and replace the while space with nothing, then all of the whit space in you txt file will be removed.
This method can meet almost all kinds of removal. And also can apply in excel or word and so on.
Good luck!
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.
Using this:
grep -A1 -B1 "test_pattern" file
will produce one line before and after the matched pattern in the file. Is there a way to display not lines but a specified number of characters?
The lines in my file are pretty big so I am not interested in printing the entire line but rather only observe the match in context. Any suggestions on how to do this?
3 characters before and 4 characters after
$> echo "some123_string_and_another" | grep -o -P '.{0,3}string.{0,4}'
23_string_and
grep -E -o ".{0,5}test_pattern.{0,5}" test.txt
This will match up to 5 characters before and after your pattern. The -o switch tells grep to only show the match and -E to use an extended regular expression. Make sure to put the quotes around your expression, else it might be interpreted by the shell.
You could use
awk '/test_pattern/ {
match($0, /test_pattern/); print substr($0, RSTART - 10, RLENGTH + 20);
}' file
You mean, like this:
grep -o '.\{0,20\}test_pattern.\{0,20\}' file
?
That will print up to twenty characters on either side of test_pattern. The \{0,20\} notation is like *, but specifies zero to twenty repetitions instead of zero or more.The -o says to show only the match itself, rather than the entire line.
I'll never easily remember these cryptic command modifiers so I took the top answer and turned it into a function in my ~/.bashrc file:
cgrep() {
# For files that are arrays 10's of thousands of characters print.
# Use cpgrep to print 30 characters before and after search pattern.
if [ $# -eq 2 ] ; then
# Format was 'cgrep "search string" /path/to/filename'
grep -o -P ".{0,30}$1.{0,30}" "$2"
else
# Format was 'cat /path/to/filename | cgrep "search string"
grep -o -P ".{0,30}$1.{0,30}"
fi
} # cgrep()
Here's what it looks like in action:
$ ll /tmp/rick/scp.Mf7UdS/Mf7UdS.Source
-rw-r--r-- 1 rick rick 25780 Jul 3 19:05 /tmp/rick/scp.Mf7UdS/Mf7UdS.Source
$ cat /tmp/rick/scp.Mf7UdS/Mf7UdS.Source | cgrep "Link to iconic"
1:43:30.3540244000 /mnt/e/bin/Link to iconic S -rwxrwxrwx 777 rick 1000 ri
$ cgrep "Link to iconic" /tmp/rick/scp.Mf7UdS/Mf7UdS.Source
1:43:30.3540244000 /mnt/e/bin/Link to iconic S -rwxrwxrwx 777 rick 1000 ri
The file in question is one continuous 25K line and it is hopeless to find what you are looking for using regular grep.
Notice the two different ways you can call cgrep that parallels grep method.
There is a "niftier" way of creating the function where "$2" is only passed when set which would save 4 lines of code. I don't have it handy though. Something like ${parm2} $parm2. If I find it I'll revise the function and this answer.
With gawk , you can use match function:
x="hey there how are you"
echo "$x" |awk --re-interval '{match($0,/(.{4})how(.{4})/,a);print a[1],a[2]}'
ere are
If you are ok with perl, more flexible solution : Following will print three characters before the pattern followed by actual pattern and then 5 character after the pattern.
echo hey there how are you |perl -lne 'print "$1$2$3" if /(.{3})(there)(.{5})/'
ey there how
This can also be applied to words instead of just characters.Following will print one word before the actual matching string.
echo hey there how are you |perl -lne 'print $1 if /(\w+) there/'
hey
Following will print one word after the pattern:
echo hey there how are you |perl -lne 'print $2 if /(\w+) there (\w+)/'
how
Following will print one word before the pattern , then the actual word and then one word after the pattern:
echo hey there how are you |perl -lne 'print "$1$2$3" if /(\w+)( there )(\w+)/'
hey there how
If using ripgreg this is how you would do it:
grep -E -o ".{0,5}test_pattern.{0,5}" test.txt
You can use regexp grep for finding + second grep for highlight
echo "some123_string_and_another" | grep -o -P '.{0,3}string.{0,4}' | grep string
23_string_and
With ugrep you can specify -ABC context with option -o (--only-matching) to show the match with extra characters of context before and/or after the match, fitting the match plus the context within the specified -ABC width. For example:
ugrep -o -C30 pattern testfile.txt
gives:
1: ... long line with an example pattern to match. The line could...
2: ...nother example line with a pattern.
The same on a terminal with color highlighting gives:
Multiple matches on a line are either shown with [+nnn more]:
or with option -k (--column-number) to show each individually with context and the column number:
The context width is the number of Unicode characters displayed (UTF-8/16/32), not just ASCII.
I personally do something similar to the posted answers.. but since the dot key, like any keyboard key, can be tapped or held down.. and I often don't need a lot of context(if I needed more I might do the lines like grep -C but often like you I don't want lines before and after), so I find it much quicker for entering the command, to just tap the dot key for how many dots / how many characters, if it's a few then tapping the key, or hold it down for more.
e.g. echo zzzabczzzz | grep -o '.abc..'
Will have the abc pattern with one dot before and two after. ( in regex language, Dot matches any character). Others used dot too but with curly braces to specify repetition.
If I wanted to be strict re between (0 or x) characters and exactly y characters, then i'd use the curlies.. and -P, as others have done.
There is a setting re whether dot matches new line but you can look into that if it's a concern/interest.