I have a Bash script that I use to pull in several repos to create a new instance of our project workflow, which carries out a number of string replacements based on information provided from the command line.
A colleague uses ZSH and has been experiencing issues that seem to be as a result of the use of sed in the script. Specifically it seems to be that it's not processing the regex? For example...
# Author Name.
if [[ $authorname ]]
then
sed -i "" "s/Author Name/$authorname/g" "$file"
fi
Resulting in the following error:
sed: can't read "s/Author Name/$authorname/g" : No such file or directory
We've found that by adding the -e flag the majority of the string replacement errors go away, however he still gets a number of 'not found' errors...
sed: can't read : No such file or directory
Is there a better way to carry out the string replacement that is both Bash and ZSH friendly?
Presumable you are using GNU sed, which does not take -i "" like patterns for editing the file in place like BSD sed.
From man sed:
-i[SUFFIX], --in-place[=SUFFIX]
You need to remove the space in between:
sed -i"" "s/Author Name/$authorname/g" "$file"
Or as you are not taking any backup, simply do:
sed -i "s/Author Name/$authorname/g" "$file"
if you do that:
sed -i "" "s/Author Name/$authorname/g" "$file"
First argument "" is considered as the regex, and the others as the files, hence the error you're getting.
Just remove the "" of your command line.
Alternately, if your commands are dynamic you can do:
sed -i -e "" -e "s/Author Name/$authorname/g" "$file"
first regex will be ignored.
Related
From some online reading, it seems that sed's -e flag usage is to note a sed script
e.g:
sed -i -e 's/default_language/language/g' "$CONF_FILE"
but from self-testing and some online search, it seems that this line should also work:
sed -i 's/default_language/language/g' "$CONF_FILE"
So what do I need -e for? Is it only useful for cases I'd like to write several scripts in a row? That can also be managed with ;.
According to the manual:
If no -e, --expression, -f, or --file option is given, then the first non-option argument is taken as the sed
script to interpret. All remaining arguments are names of input files; if no input files are specified, then
the standard input is read.
As you already mentioned, -e may be used for multiple commands.
sed 'cmd1; cmd2'
sed -e 'cmd1; cmd2'
sed -e 'cmd1' -e 'cmd2'
What does #$VAR mean in Shell? I don't get the use of # in this case.
I encountered the following shell file while working on my dotfiles repo
#!/usr/bin/env bash
KEY="$1"
VALUE="$2"
FILE="$3"
touch "$FILE"
if grep -q "$1=" "$FILE"; then
sed "s#$KEY=.*#$KEY=\"$VALUE\"#" -i "$FILE"
else
echo "export $KEY=\"$VALUE\"" >> "$FILE"
fi
and I'm struggling with understanding the sed "s#$KEY=.*#$KEY=\"$VALUE\"#" -i "$FILE" line, especially the use of #.
When using sed you must not necessarily use a / character as the delimiter for the substitute action.
Thereby, the #, or % characters are also perfectly fine options to be used instead:
echo A | sed s/A/B/
echo A | sed s#A#B#
echo A | sed s%A%B%
In the command
sed "s#$KEY=.*#$KEY=\"$VALUE\"#" -i "$FILE"
the character # is used as a delimiter in the s command of sed. The general form of the s (substitute) command is
s<delim><searchPattern><delim><replaceString><delim>[<flags>]
where the most commonly used <delim> is /, but other characters are sometimes used, especially when either <searchPattern> or <replaceString> contain (or might contain) slashes.
I have a file named test-domain, the contents of which contain the line 100.am.
When I do this, the line with 100.am is deleted from the test-domain file, as expected:
for x in $(echo 100.am); do sed -i "/$x/d" test-domain; done
However, if instead of echo 100.am, I read each line from a file named unwanted-lines, it does NOT work.
for x in $(cat unwanted-lines); do sed -i "/$x/d" test-domain; done
This is even if the only contents of unwanted-lines is one line, with the exact contents 100.am.
Does anyone know why sed delete line works if you use echo in your variable, but not if you use cat?
fgrep -v -f unwanted-lines test-domain > /tmp/Buffer
mv /tmp/Buffer test-domain
sed is not interesting in this case due to multiple call in shell (poor efficiency and lot of ressources used). The way to still use sed is to preload line to delete, and make a search base on this preloaded info but very heavy compare to fgrep in this case
Does anyone know why sed delete line works if you use echo in your
variable, but not if you use cat?
I believe that your file containing unwanted lines contains CR+LF line endings due to which it doesn't work when you use the file. You could strip the CR in your loop:
for x in $(cat unwanted-lines); do x="${x//$'\r'}"; sed -i "/$x/d" test-domain; done
One better strategy than yours would be to use a genuine editor, e.g., ed, as so:
ed -s test-domain < <(
shopt -s extglob
while IFS= read -r l; do
[[ $l = *([[:space:]]) ]] && continue
l=${l//./\\.}
echo "g/$l/d"
done < unwanted-lines
echo "wq"
)
Caveat. You must make sure that the file unwanted-lines doesn't contain any character that could clash with ed's regexps and commands. I have already included a match for a period (i.e., replace . with \.).
This method is quite efficient, as you're not forking so many times on sed, writing temp files, renaming them, etc.
Another possibility would be to use grep, but then you won't have the editing option ed offers.
Remark. ed is the standard editor.
why not just applying the sed command on your file?
sed -i '/.*100\.am/d' your_file
I have a large number of words in a text file to replace.
This script is working up until the sed command where I get:
sed: 1: "*.js": invalid command code *
PS... Bash isn't one of my strong points - this doesn't need to be pretty or efficient
cd '/Users/xxxxxx/Sites/xxxxxx'
echo `pwd`;
for line in `cat myFile.txt`
do
export IFS=":"
i=0
list=()
for word in $line; do
list[$i]=$word
i=$[i+1]
done
echo ${list[0]}
echo ${list[1]}
sed -i "s/{$list[0]}/{$list[1]}/g" *.js
done
You're running BSD sed (under OS X), therefore the -i flag requires an argument specifying what you want the suffix to be.
Also, no files match the glob *.js.
This looks like a simple typo:
sed -i "s/{$list[0]}/{$list[1]}/g" *.js
Should be:
sed -i "s/${list[0]}/${list[1]}/g" *.js
(just like the echo lines above)
So myFile.txt contains a list of from:to substitutions, and you are looping over each of those. Why don't you create a sed script from this file instead?
cd '/Users/xxxxxx/Sites/xxxxxx'
sed -e 's/^/s:/' -e 's/$/:/' myFile.txt |
# Output from first sed script is a sed script!
# It contains substitutions like this:
# s:from:to:
# s:other:substitute:
sed -f - -i~ *.js
Your sed might not like the -f - which means sed should read its script from standard input. If that is the case, perhaps you can create a temporary script like this instead;
sed -e 's/^/s:/' -e 's/$/:/' myFile.txt >script.sed
sed -f script.sed -i~ *.js
Another approach, if you don't feel very confident with sed and think you are going to forget in a week what the meaning of that voodoo symbols is, could be using IFS in a more efficient way:
IFS=":"
cat myFile.txt | while read PATTERN REPLACEMENT # You feed the while loop with stdout lines and read fields separated by ":"
do
sed -i "s/${PATTERN}/${REPLACEMENT}/g"
done
The only pitfall I can see (it may be more) is that if whether PATTERN or REPLACEMENT contain a slash (/) they are going to destroy your sed expression.
You can change the sed separator with a non-printable character and you should be safe.
Anyway, if you know whats on your myFile.txt you can just use any.
I am using sed in a script to do a replace and I want to have the replaced file overwrite the file. Normally I think that you would use this:
% sed -i 's/cat/dog/' manipulate
sed: illegal option -- i
However as you can see my sed does not have that command.
I tried this:
% sed 's/cat/dog/' manipulate > manipulate
But this just turns manipulate into an empty file (makes sense).
This works:
% sed 's/cat/dog/' manipulate > tmp; mv tmp manipulate
But I was wondering if there was a standard way to redirect output into the same file that input was taken from.
I commonly use the 3rd way, but with an important change:
$ sed 's/cat/dog/' manipulate > tmp && mv tmp manipulate
I.e. change ; to && so the move only happens if sed is successful; otherwise you'll lose your original file as soon as you make a typo in your sed syntax.
Note! For those reading the title and missing the OP's constraint "my sed doesn't support -i": For most people, sed will support -i, so the best way to do this is:
$ sed -i 's/cat/dog/' manipulate
Yes, -i is also supported in FreeBSD/MacOSX sed, but needs the empty string as an argument to edit a file in-place.
sed -i "" 's/old/new/g' file # FreeBSD sed
If you don't want to move copies around, you could use ed:
ed file.txt <<EOF
%s/cat/dog/
wq
EOF
Kernighan and Pike in The Art of Unix Programming discuss this issue. Their solution is to write a script called overwrite, which allows one to do such things.
The usage is: overwrite file cmd file.
# overwrite: copy standard input to output after EOF
opath=$PATH
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin
case $# in
0|1) echo 'Usage: overwrite file cmd [args]' 1>&2; exit 2
esac
file=$1; shift
new=/tmp/overwr1.$$; old=/tmp/overwr2.$$
trap 'rm -f $new $old; exit 1' 1 2 15 # clean up
if PATH=$opath "$#" >$new
then
cp $file $old # save original
trap '' 1 2 15 # wr are commmitted
cp $new $file
else
echo "overwrite: $1 failed, $file unchanged" 1>&2
exit 1
fi
rm -f $new $old
Once you have the above script in your $PATH, you can do:
overwrite manipulate sed 's/cat/dog/' manipulate
To make your life easier, you can use replace script from the same book:
# replace: replace str1 in files with str2 in place
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin
case $# in
0|2) echo 'Usage: replace str1 str2 files' 1>&2; exit 1
esac
left="$1"; right="$2"; shift; shift
for i
do
overwrite $i sed "s#$left#$right#g" $i
done
Having replace in your $PATH too will allow you to say:
replace cat dog manipulate
You can use sponge from the moreutils.
sed "s/cat/dog/" manipulate | sponge manipulate
Perhaps -i is gnu sed, or just an old version of sed, but anyways. You're on the right track. The first option is probably the most common one, the third option is if you want it to work everywhere (including solaris machines)... :) These are the 'standard' ways of doing it.
To change multiple files (and saving a backup of each as *.bak):
perl -p -i -e "s/oldtext/newtext/g" *
replaces any occurence of oldtext by newtext in all files in the current folder. However you will have to escape all perl special characters within oldtext and newtext using the backslash
This is called a “Perl pie” (mnemonic: easy as a pie)
The -i flag tells it do do in-place replacement, and it should be ok to use single (“'”) as well as double (“””) quotes.
If using ./* instead of just *, you should be able to do it in all sub-directories
See man perlrun for more details, including how to take a backup file of the original.
using sed:
sed -i 's/old/new/g' ./* (used in GNU)
sed -i '' 's/old/new/g' ./* (used in FreeBSD)
-i option is not available in standard sed.
Your alternatives are your third way or perl.
A lot of answers, but none of them is correct. Here is the correct and simplest one:
$ echo "111 222 333" > file.txt
$ sed -i -s s/222/444/ file.txt
$ cat file.txt
111 444 333
$
Workaround using open file handles:
exec 3<manipulate
Prevent open file from being truncated:
rm manipulate
sed 's/cat/dog/' <&3 > manipulate