Variable not getting assigned in bash after a curl hit - bash

I have a shell script where I have a statement:
isPartial = $searchCurl| grep -Po '\"partialSearch\":(true|false)'|sed 's/\\\"partialSearch\\\"://'
now, if I just echo the RHS
$searchCurl| grep -Po '\"partialSearch\":(true|false)'|sed 's/\\\"partialSearch\\\"://'
it prints "partialSearch":true, but the variable isPartial doesn't get initialized .
Why is this happening and how can I fix it ?

Since the number of backslashes in your examples varies, it is not clear to me if the double quotes are already escaped in the input text. I’ll assume they are not, i.e. the input text looks something like:
sometext... "partialSearch":true ... sometext...
..bla bla bla... "partialsearch":false ...
and my examples below will work under this assumption.
There are a number of points to be made.
You seem to be trying to parse JSON input with regular expressions. While this could be acceptable for quick-and-dirty one-time jobs where you know the exact format of the data being processed, in general it is a very bad idea. You should use a JSON parser like jq.
You obviously have stored some bash code in the variable searchCurl. This is considered bad practice. Instead of searchCurl="... code ..." you should do function searchCurl () { ... code ... } and call searchCurl without prefixing it with a dollar sign. Variables are for values, functions are for code.
In most cases, if you are going to use sed, it’s better to use it for everything without invoking grep. Sometimes it can be simpler to have both. See below for an example.
To assign the output of a command to a variable, you have to use command substitution.
In short, if in your input text you have only one match of '"partialSearch":(true|false)', this is what you want:
isPartial=$(searchCurl|sed -rn 's/^.*"partialSearch":(true|false).*$/\1/p')
If you have more and the input text is one big line as I suppose, usage of grep -o might simplify the task of splitting the input into one match per line, so that
isPartial=$(searchCurl|grep -Po '"partialSearch":(true|false)'|sed -e 's/^.*://')
might be what you want (and in this case, isPartial will hold a space-separated list of true and false).

Related

sed command for inserting text inside single quote

Suppose there's a text file with the following line:
export MYSQL_ADMIN=''
I want to insert text inside that single quote using the sed command, so that it changes to something like this for example:
export MYSQL_ADMIN='abc1'
What is the appropriate sed command for that in Linux?
I tried
sed -i -e ''/MYSQL_ADMIN/s/''/'abc1'/g"
but it didn't work.
Something like sed -i "s;export MYSQL_ADMIN=.*;export MYSQL_ADMIN='abc1';" /path/to/file.ext
-i modify file in place
s means substitute,
First block is what you are matching as an regular expression - the .* matches everything to the end of the line, this ensures you don't keep any text on that line after the substitue - and second block is what you are replacing with that match.
Always check the file after each run of sed if there is no error and check what changed.
To get the single quotes to print you may have to do ""'"" like ""'""abc1""'""
It is important to understand that although
I want to insert text inside that single quote using the sed command
is a perfectly good characterization of the effect you want to achieve, it does not map directly onto operations from sed's repertoire. With sed, the appropriate tool for most line modifications is the s command, which substitutes specified text for one or more matches to a specified regular expression. That would be the most natural thing to use for your case.
Additionally, it is important with sed to understand how and when to bind commands to specific lines. If you don't do that for a given command then it is applied to all lines. Sometimes that's fine, but other times it will produce unwanted results.
I tried
sed -i -e ''/MYSQL_ADMIN/s/''/'abc1'/g"
but it didn't work.
The two leading single quotes in that sed expression match each other, leaving the trailing double quote unmatched. Also, you do not specify the name of the file to modify. This variation would at least be valid shell syntax, and it would have the desired effect on the specified line appearing in file my_script:
sed -i -e "/MYSQL_ADMIN/s/''/'abc1'/g" my_script
That might also make other, unwanted changes, however.
You need to make some assumptions about the content of the file in order to do such a thing at all. The above depends on the text MYSQL_ADMIN and '' to appear on the same line only in the line(s) you want to modify. That may turn out to hold, but it seems unnecessarily risky. An assumption more likely to hold in general would be that there will be only one assignment to variable MYSQL_ADMIN, or that it is acceptable to modify all such assignments that assign a single-quote-delimited empty value.
Going with the latter, one might end up with this:
sed -i -e "s/\<MYSQL_ADMIN=''\(\s\|$\)/MYSQL_ADMIN='abc1'\1/g" my_script
The pattern \<MYSQL_ADMIN=''\(\s\|$\) improves on your plain MYSQL_ADMIN in these significant ways:
the \< causes it to match only immediately after a word boundary -- start of line, whitesepace, or punctuation. This prevents substitutions for other variables whose names happen to end with MYSQL_ADMIN. If you prefer, it would be even stronger to instead anchor the match to the beginning of the line with ^.
including the ='' in the pattern distinguishes between MYSQL_ADMIN and variables whose names contain that as an initial substring. It also ensures that the '' that gets replaced, if any, goes with the variable and does not merely appear somewhere else on the line.
the \(\s\|$\) both matches and captures either a whitespace character or the empty string at the end of a line. This distinguishes between assignments of an empty value and assignments of values that are merely prefixed by '' (which is valid if the file is a shell script). Having included it in the match, the capture allows the matched text, if any, to be preserved in the output (via the \1 in the replacement).
Because that matches the whole assignment, a complete assignment must appear in the replacement, too. On the other hand, this means that (probably) you can apply the command to every line, as shown, with no particular loss of efficiency relative to the previous command.
Even that might produce changes you didn't want, however, such as in comment lines or quoted text.

Combine two expression in Bash

I did check the ABS, but it was hard to find a reference to my problem/question there.
Here it is. Consider the following code (Which extracts the first character of OtherVar and then converts MyVar to uppercase):
OtherVar=foobar
MyChar=${OtherVar:0:1} # get first character of OtherVar string variable
MyChar=${MyChar^} # first character to upper case
Could I somehow condense the second and third line into one statement?
P.S.: As was pointed out below, not needs to have a named variable. I should add, I would like to not add any sub-shells or so and would also accept a somehow hacky way to achieve the desired result.
P.P.S.: The question is purely educational.
You could do it all-in-one without forking sub-shell or running external command:
printf -v MyChar %1s "${OtherVar^}"
Or:
read -n1 MyChar <<<"${OtherVar^}"
Another option:
declare -u MyChar=${OtherVar:0:1}
But I can't see the point in such optimization in a bash script.
There are more suitable text processing interpreters, like awk, sed, even perl or python if performance matters.
You could use the cut command and put it in a complex expression to get it on one line, but I'm not sure it makes the code too much clearer:
OtherVar=foobar
MyChar=$(echo ${OtherVar^} | cut -c1-1) # uppercase first character and cut string

how to edit url string with sed

My Linux repository file contain a link that until now was using http with a port number to point to it repository.
baseurl=http://host.domain.com:123/folder1/folder2
I now need a way to replace that URL to use https with no port or a different port .
I need also the possibility to change the server name for example from host.domain.com to host2.domain.com
So my idea was to use sed to search for the start of the http until the first / that come after the 2 // thus catching whatever in between and will give me the ability to change both server name port or http\s usage.
Im now using this code (im using echo just for the example):
the example shows how in 2 cases where one time i have a link with http and port 123 converted to https and the second time the other way around
and both code i was using the same sed for generic reasons.
WANTED_URL="https://host.domain.com"
echo 'http://host.domain.com:123/folder1/folder2' | sed -i "s|http.*://[^/]*|$WANTED_URL|"
OR
WANTED_URL="http://host.domain.com:123"
echo 'https://host.domain.com/folder1/folder2' | sed -i "s|http.*://[^/]*|$WANTED_URL|"
is that the correct way doing so?
sed regexes are greedy by default. You can tell sed to consume only non-slashes, like this:
echo 'http://host.domain.com:123/folder1/folder2' | sed -e 's|http://[^/]*|https://host.domain.com|'
result:
https://host.domain.com/folder1/folder2
(BTW you don't have to escape slashes because you are using an alternate separating character)
the key is using [^/]* which will match anything but slashes so it stops matching at the first slash (non-greedy).
You used /.*/ and .* can contain slashes, not that you wanted (greedy by default).
Anyway my approach is different because expression does not include the trailing slash so it is not removed from final output.
Assuming it doesn't really matter if you have 1 sed script or 2 and there isn't a good reason to hard-code the URLs:
$ echo 'http://host.domain.com:123/folder1/folder2' |
sed 's|\(:[^:]*\)[^/]*|s\1|'
https://host.domain.com/folder1/folder2
$ port='123'; echo 'https://host.domain.com/folder1/folder2' |
sed 's|s\(://[^/]*\)|\1:'"$port"'|'
http://host.domain.com:123/folder1/folder2
If that isn't what you need then edit your question to clarify your requirements and in particular explain why:
You want to use hard-coded URLs, and
You need 1 script to do both transformations.
and provide concise, testable sample input and expected output that demonstrates those needs (i.e. cases where the above doesn't work).
wrt what you had:
WANTED_URL="https://host.domain.com"
echo 'http://host.domain.com:123/folder1/folder2' | sed -i "s|http.*://[^/]*|$WANTED_URL|"
The main issues are:
Don't use all-upper-case for non-exported shell variable names to avoid clashes with exported variables and to avoid obfuscating your code (this convention has been around for 40 years so people expect all upper case variables to be exported).
Never enclose any script in double quotes as it exposes the whole script to the shell for interpretation before the command you want to execute even sees it. Instead just open up the single quotes around the smallest script segment possible when necessary, i.e. to expand $y in a script use cmd 'x'"$y"'z' not cmd "x${y}z" because the latter will fail cryptically and dangerously given various input, script text, environment settings and/or the contents of the directory you run it from.
The -i option for sed is to edit a file in-place so you can't use it on an incoming pipe because you can't edit a pipe in-place.
When you let a shell variable expand to become part of a script, you have to take care about the possible characters it contains and how they'll be interpreted by the command given the context the variable expands into. If you let a whole URL expand into the replacement section of a sed script then you have to be careful to first escape any potential backreference characters or script delimiters. See Is it possible to escape regex metacharacters reliably with sed. If you just let the port number expand then you don't have to deal with any of that.

Substitution of substring doesn't work in bash (tried sed, ${a/b/c/})

Before to write, of course I read many other similar cases. Example I used #!/bin/bash instead of #!/bin/sh
I have a very simple script that reads lines from a template file and wants to replace some keywords with real data. Example the string <NAME> will be replaced with a real name. In the example I want to replace it with the word Giuseppe. I tried 2 solutions but they don't work.
#!/bin/bash
#read the template and change variable information
while read LINE
do
sed 'LINE/<NAME>/Giuseppe' #error: sed: -e expression #1, char 2: extra characters after command
${LINE/<NAME>/Giuseppe} #error: WORD(*) command not found
done < template_mail.txt
(*) WORD is the first word found in the line
I am sorry if the question is too basic, but I cannot see the error and the error message is not helping.
EDIT1:
The input file should not be changed, i want to use it for every mail. Every time i read it, i will change with a different name according to the receiver.
EDIT2:
Thanks your answers i am closer to the solution. My example was a simplified case, but i want to change also other data. I want to do multiple substitutions to the same string, but BASH allows me only to make one substitution. In all programming languages i used, i was able to substitute from a string, but BASH makes this very difficult for me. The following lines don't work:
CUSTOM_MAIL=$(sed 's/<NAME>/Giuseppe/' template_mail.txt) # from file it's ok
CUSTOM_MAIL=$(sed 's/<VALUE>/30/' CUSTOM_MAIL) # from variable doesn't work
I want to modify CUSTOM_MAIL a few times in order to include a few real informations.
CUSTOM_MAIL=$(sed 's/<VALUE1>/value1/' template_mail.txt)
${CUSTOM_MAIL/'<VALUE2>'/'value2'}
${CUSTOM_MAIL/'<VALUE3>'/'value3'}
${CUSTOM_MAIL/'<VALUE4>'/'value4'}
What's the way?
No need to do the loop manually. sed command itself runs the expression on each line of provided file:
sed 's/<NAME>/Giuseppe/' template_mail.txt > output_file.txt
You might need g modifier if there are more appearances of the <NAME> string on one line: s/<NAME>/Giuseppe/g

Search and replace in Shell

I am writing a shell (bash) script and I'm trying to figure out an easy way to accomplish a simple task.
I have some string in a variable.
I don't know if this is relevant, but it can contain spaces, newlines, because actually this string is the content of a whole text file.
I want to replace the last occurence of a certain substring with something else.
Perhaps I could use a regexp for that, but there are two moments that confuse me:
I need to match from the end, not from the start
the substring that I want to scan for is fixed, not variable.
for truncating at the start: ${var#pattern}
truncating at the end ${var%pattern}
${var/pattern/repl} for general replacement
the patterns are 'filename' style expansion, and the last one can be prefixed with # or % to match only at the start or end (respectively)
it's all in the (long) bash manpage. check the "Parameter Expansion" chapter.
amn expression like this
s/match string here$/new string/
should do the trick - s is for sustitute, / break up the command, and the $ is the end of line marker. You can try this in vi to see if it does what you need.
I would look up the man pages for awk or sed.
Javier's answer is shell specific and won't work in all shells.
The sed answers that MrTelly and epochwolf alluded to are incomplete and should look something like this:
MyString="stuff ttto be edittted"
NewString=`echo $MyString | sed -e 's/\(.*\)ttt\(.*\)/\1xxx\2/'`
The reason this works without having to use the $ to mark the end is that the first '.*' is greedy and will attempt to gather up as much as possible while allowing the rest of the regular expression to be true.
This sed command should work fine in any shell context used.
Usually when I get stuck with Sed I use this page,
http://sed.sourceforge.net/sed1line.txt

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