I am trying to extract "first 12 of last 24 character" from a line, i.e.,
for a line:
species,subl,cmp= 1 4 1 s1,torque= 0.41207E-09-0.45586E-13
I need to extract "0.41207E-0".
(I have not written the code, so don't curse me for its formatting. )
I have managed to do this via:
var_s=`grep "species,subl,cmp= $3 $4 $5" $tfile |sed -n '$s/.*\(........................\)$/\1/p'|sed -n '$s/\(............\).*$/\1/p'`
but, is there any more readable way of doing this, rather then counting dots?
EDIT
Thanks to both of you;
so, I have sed,awk grep and bash.
I will run that in loop, for 100's of file.
so, can you also suggest me which one is most efficient, wrt time?
One way with GNU sed (without counting dots):
$ sed -r 's/.*(.{11}).{12}/\1/' file
0.41207E-09
Similarly with GNU grep:
$ grep -Po '.{11}(?=.{12}$)' file
0.41207E-09
Perhaps a python solution may also be helpful:
python -c 'import sys;print "\n".join([a[-24:-13] for a in sys.stdin])' < file
0.41207E-09
I'm not sure your example data and question match up so just change the values in the {n} quantifier accordingly.
Simplest is using pure bash:
echo "${str:(-24):12}"
OR awk can also do that:
awk '{print substr($0, length($0)-23, 12)}' <<< $str
OUTPUT:
0.41207E-09
EDIT: For using bash solution on a file:
while read l; do echo "${l:(-24):12}"; done < file
Another one, less efficient but has the advantage of making you discover new tools
`echo "$str" | rev | cut -b 1-24 | rev | cut -b 1-12
You can use awk to get first 12 characters of last 24 characters from a line:
awk '{substr($0,(length($0)-23))};{print substr($0,(length($0)-10))}' myfile.txt
Related
I want to remove some n lines from the end of a file. Can this be done using sed?
For example, to remove lines from 2 to 4, I can use
$ sed '2,4d' file
But I don't know the line numbers. I can delete the last line using
$sed $d file
but I want to know the way to remove n lines from the end. Please let me know how to do that using sed or some other method.
I don't know about sed, but it can be done with head:
head -n -2 myfile.txt
If hardcoding n is an option, you can use sequential calls to sed. For instance, to delete the last three lines, delete the last one line thrice:
sed '$d' file | sed '$d' | sed '$d'
From the sed one-liners:
# delete the last 10 lines of a file
sed -e :a -e '$d;N;2,10ba' -e 'P;D' # method 1
sed -n -e :a -e '1,10!{P;N;D;};N;ba' # method 2
Seems to be what you are looking for.
A funny & simple sed and tac solution :
n=4
tac file.txt | sed "1,$n{d}" | tac
NOTE
double quotes " are needed for the shell to evaluate the $n variable in sed command. In single quotes, no interpolate will be performed.
tac is a cat reversed, see man 1 tac
the {} in sed are there to separate $n & d (if not, the shell try to interpolate non existent $nd variable)
Use sed, but let the shell do the math, with the goal being to use the d command by giving a range (to remove the last 23 lines):
sed -i "$(($(wc -l < file)-22)),\$d" file
To remove the last 3 lines, from inside out:
$(wc -l < file)
Gives the number of lines of the file: say 2196
We want to remove the last 23 lines, so for left side or range:
$((2196-22))
Gives: 2174
Thus the original sed after shell interpretation is:
sed -i '2174,$d' file
With -i doing inplace edit, file is now 2173 lines!
If you want to save it into a new file, the code is:
sed -i '2174,$d' file > outputfile
You could use head for this.
Use
$ head --lines=-N file > new_file
where N is the number of lines you want to remove from the file.
The contents of the original file minus the last N lines are now in new_file
Just for completeness I would like to add my solution.
I ended up doing this with the standard ed:
ed -s sometextfile <<< $'-2,$d\nwq'
This deletes the last 2 lines using in-place editing (although it does use a temporary file in /tmp !!)
To truncate very large files truly in-place we have truncate command.
It doesn't know about lines, but tail + wc can convert lines to bytes:
file=bigone.log
lines=3
truncate -s -$(tail -$lines $file | wc -c) $file
There is an obvious race condition if the file is written at the same time.
In this case it may be better to use head - it counts bytes from the beginning of file (mind disk IO), so we will always truncate on line boundary (possibly more lines than expected if file is actively written):
truncate -s $(head -n -$lines $file | wc -c) $file
Handy one-liner if you fail login attempt putting password in place of username:
truncate -s $(head -n -5 /var/log/secure | wc -c) /var/log/secure
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed ':a;$!N;1,4ba;P;$d;D' file
Most of the above answers seem to require GNU commands/extensions:
$ head -n -2 myfile.txt
-2: Badly formed number
For a slightly more portible solution:
perl -ne 'push(#fifo,$_);print shift(#fifo) if #fifo > 10;'
OR
perl -ne 'push(#buf,$_);END{print #buf[0 ... $#buf-10]}'
OR
awk '{buf[NR-1]=$0;}END{ for ( i=0; i < (NR-10); i++){ print buf[i];} }'
Where "10" is "n".
With the answers here you'd have already learnt that sed is not the best tool for this application.
However I do think there is a way to do this in using sed; the idea is to append N lines to hold space untill you are able read without hitting EOF. When EOF is hit, print the contents of hold space and quit.
sed -e '$!{N;N;N;N;N;N;H;}' -e x
The sed command above will omit last 5 lines.
It can be done in 3 steps:
a) Count the number of lines in the file you want to edit:
n=`cat myfile |wc -l`
b) Subtract from that number the number of lines to delete:
x=$((n-3))
c) Tell sed to delete from that line number ($x) to the end:
sed "$x,\$d" myfile
You can get the total count of lines with wc -l <file> and use
head -n <total lines - lines to remove> <file>
Try the following command:
n = line number
tail -r file_name | sed '1,nd' | tail -r
This will remove the last 3 lines from file:
for i in $(seq 1 3); do sed -i '$d' file; done;
I prefer this solution;
head -$(gcalctool -s $(cat file | wc -l)-N) file
where N is the number of lines to remove.
sed -n ':pre
1,4 {N;b pre
}
:cycle
$!{P;N;D;b cycle
}' YourFile
posix version
To delete last 4 lines:
$ nl -b a file | sort -k1,1nr | sed '1, 4 d' | sort -k1,1n | sed 's/^ *[0-9]*\t//'
I came up with this, where n is the number of lines you want to delete:
count=`wc -l file`
lines=`expr "$count" - n`
head -n "$lines" file > temp.txt
mv temp.txt file
rm -f temp.txt
It's a little roundabout, but I think it's easy to follow.
Count up the number of lines in the main file
Subtract the number of lines you want to remove from the count
Print out the number of lines you want to keep and store in a temp file
Replace the main file with the temp file
Remove the temp file
For deleting the last N lines of a file, you can use the same concept of
$ sed '2,4d' file
You can use a combo with tail command to reverse the file: if N is 5
$ tail -r file | sed '1,5d' file | tail -r > file
And this way runs also where head -n -5 file command doesn't run (like on a mac!).
#!/bin/sh
echo 'Enter the file name : '
read filename
echo 'Enter the number of lines from the end that needs to be deleted :'
read n
#Subtracting from the line number to get the nth line
m=`expr $n - 1`
# Calculate length of the file
len=`cat $filename|wc -l`
#Calculate the lines that must remain
lennew=`expr $len - $m`
sed "$lennew,$ d" $filename
A solution similar to https://stackoverflow.com/a/24298204/1221137 but with editing in place and not hardcoded number of lines:
n=4
seq $n | xargs -i sed -i -e '$d' my_file
In docker, this worked for me:
head --lines=-N file_path > file_path
Say you have several lines:
$ cat <<EOF > 20lines.txt
> 1
> 2
> 3
[snip]
> 18
> 19
> 20
> EOF
Then you can grab:
# leave last 15 out
$ head -n5 20lines.txt
1
2
3
4
5
# skip first 14
$ tail -n +15 20lines.txt
15
16
17
18
19
20
POSIX compliant solution using ex / vi, in the vein of #Michel's solution above.
#Michel's ed example uses "not-POSIX" Here-Strings.
Increment the $-1 to remove n lines to the EOF ($), or just feed the lines you want to (d)elete. You could use ex to count line numbers or do any other Unix stuff.
Given the file:
cat > sometextfile <<EOF
one
two
three
four
five
EOF
Executing:
ex -s sometextfile <<'EOF'
$-1,$d
%p
wq!
EOF
Returns:
one
two
three
This uses POSIX Here-Docs so it is really easy to modify - especially using set -o vi with a POSIX /bin/sh.
While on the subject, the "ex personality" of "vim" should be fine, but YMMV.
This will remove the last 12 lines
sed -n -e :a -e '1,10!{P;N;D;};N;ba'
I have a text file called temp.txt that consists of 3 serial numbers.
AB400-251429-0014
AA200-251429-0028
AD200-251430-0046
The 11th and 12th characters in the serial number correspond to the week. I want to extract this number for each unit and do something with it (but for this example just echo it). I have the following code:
while read line; do
week=` grep A[ABD][42]00 $line | cut -c11-12 `
echo $week
done < temp.txt
Looks like it's not working as cut is expecting a filename called the serial number in each case. Is there an alternative way to do this?
The problem is not with cut but with grep which expects a filename, but gets the line contents. Also, the expression doesn't match the IDs: they don't start with S followed by A, B, or D.
You can process lines in bash without starting a subshell:
while read line ; do
echo 11th and 12th characters are: "${line:10:2}".
done < temp.txt
Your original approach is still possible:
week=$( echo "$line" | grep 'S[ABD][42]00' | cut -c11-12 )
Note that for non matching lines, $week would be empty.
You can try also the:
grep -oP '.{10}\K..' filename
for your input prints
29
29
30
The \K mean, A variable length look-behind. With other words, the grep would look for the pattern before \K but would not include it into the result.
More precise selection of the lines:
grep -oP '[ABD][42]00-.{4}\K..' # or more precise
grep -oP '^\w[ABD][42]00-.{4}\K..' # or even more
grep -oP '^[A-Z][ABD][42]00-.{4}\K..' # or
grep -oP '^[A-Z][ABD][42]00-\d{4}\K..' # or
prints like the above, but selects the interesting lines... :)
I would use this simple awk
awk '{print substr($0,11,2)}' text.file
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29
30
To get it into an array that you can use later:
results=($(awk '{print substr($0,11,2)}' text.file))
echo "${results[#]}"
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TL;DR
Looping with Bash is pretty inefficient, especially when reading a file a line at a time. You can get what you want faster and more effectively by using grep to cut only the interesting lines, or by using awk to avoid having to call cut in a separate pipelined process.
GNU Grep and Cut Solution
$ grep '[[:alpha:]][ABD][42]' temp.txt | cut -c11,12
29
29
30
Awk Solutions
# As far as I know, this will work on most awks. If you find an exception,
# please post a constructive comment!
$ awk -v NF=1 -v FPAT=. '/[[:alpha:]][ABD][42]00/ { print $11 $12 }' temp.txt
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30
# A more elegant solution as noted by #rici that works with GNU awk,
# and possibly others.
$ gawk -v FS= '/[[:alpha:]][ABD][42]00/ { print $11 $12 }' temp.txt
29
29
30
Store the Results in a Bash Array
Either way, you can store the results of your match in an Bash array to use later. For example:
$ results=(`grep '[[:alpha:]][ABD][42]00' temp.txt | cut -c11,12`)
$ echo "${results[#]}"
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I am writing shell script for embedded Linux in a small industrial box. I have a variable containing the text pid: 1234 and I want to strip first X characters from the line, so only 1234 stays. I have more variables I need to "clean", so I need to cut away X first characters and ${string:5} doesn't work for some reason in my system.
The only thing the box seems to have is sed.
I am trying to make the following to work:
result=$(echo "$pid" | sed 's/^.\{4\}//g')
Any ideas?
The following should work:
var="pid: 1234"
var=${var:5}
Are you sure bash is the shell executing your script?
Even the POSIX-compliant
var=${var#?????}
would be preferable to using an external process, although this requires you to hard-code the 5 in the form of a fixed-length pattern.
Here's a concise method to cut the first X characters using cut(1). This example removes the first 4 characters by cutting a substring starting with 5th character.
echo "$pid" | cut -c 5-
Use the -r option ("use extended regular expressions in the script") to sed in order to use the {n} syntax:
$ echo 'pid: 1234'| sed -r 's/^.{5}//'
1234
Cut first two characters from string:
$ string="1234567890"; echo "${string:2}"
34567890
pipe it through awk '{print substr($0,42)}' where 42 is one more than the number of characters to drop. For example:
$ echo abcde| awk '{print substr($0,2)}'
bcde
$
Chances are, you'll have cut as well. If so:
[me#home]$ echo "pid: 1234" | cut -d" " -f2
1234
Well, there have been solutions here with sed, awk, cut and using bash syntax. I just want to throw in another POSIX conform variant:
$ echo "pid: 1234" | tail -c +6
1234
-c tells tail at which byte offset to start, counting from the end of the input data, yet if the the number starts with a + sign, it is from the beginning of the input data to the end.
Another way, using cut instead of sed.
result=`echo $pid | cut -c 5-`
I found the answer in pure sed supplied by this question (admittedly, posted after this question was posted). This does exactly what you asked, solely in sed:
result=\`echo "$pid" | sed '/./ { s/pid:\ //g; }'\``
The dot in sed '/./) is whatever you want to match. Your question is exactly what I was attempting to, except in my case I wanted to match a specific line in a file and then uncomment it. In my case it was:
# Uncomment a line (edit the file in-place):
sed -i '/#\ COMMENTED_LINE_TO_MATCH/ { s/#\ //g; }' /path/to/target/file
The -i after sed is to edit the file in place (remove this switch if you want to test your matching expression prior to editing the file).
(I posted this because I wanted to do this entirely with sed as this question asked and none of the previous answered solved that problem.)
Rather than removing n characters from the start, perhaps you could just extract the digits directly. Like so...
$ echo "pid: 1234" | grep -Po "\d+"
This may be a more robust solution, and seems more intuitive.
This will do the job too:
echo "$pid"|awk '{print $2}'
Sometimes I receive a CSV file which has a carriage return inside a cell. This is not an acceptable format to a program that will use it as input.
In order to detect if an input line is split, I determined that a bad line would not have the expected number of commas in it. Is there a bash or other common unix command line tool that would allow me to count the commas in the line? If necessary, I can write a Python or Perl program to do it, but if possible, I'd like to add a line or two to an existing bash script to cause it to fail if the comma count is wrong. Any ideas?
Strip everything but the commas, and then count number of characters left:
$ echo foo,bar,baz | tr -cd , | wc -c
2
To count the number of times a comma appears, you can use something like awk:
string=(line of input from CSV file)
echo "$string" | awk -F "," '{print NF-1}'
But this really isn't sufficient to determine whether a field has carriage returns in it. Fields can have commas inside as long as they're surrounded by quotes.
What worked for me better than the other solutions was this. If test.txt has:
foo,bar,baz
baz,foo,foobar,bar
Then cat test.txt | xargs -I % sh -c 'echo % | tr -cd , | wc -c' produces
2
3
This works very well for streaming sources, or tailing logs, etc.
In pure Bash:
while IFS=, read -ra array
do
echo "$((${#array[#]} - 1))"
done < inputfile
or
while read -r line
do
count=${line//[^,]}
echo "${#count}"
done < inputfile
Try Perl:
$ perl -ne 'print 0+#{[/,/g]},"\n"'
a
0
a,a
1
a,a,a,a,a
4
Depending on what you are trying to do with the CSV data, it may be helpful to use a wrapper script like csvquote to temporarily replace the problematic newlines (and commas) inside quoted fields, then restore them. For instance:
csvquote inputfile.csv | wc -l
and
csvquote inputfile.csv | cut -d, -f1 | csvquote -u
may be the sort of thing you're looking for. See [https://github.com/dbro/csvquote][1] for the code and more information
An example Python command you could run (since it's going to be installed on most modern shells) is:
python -c "import pathlib; print({l.count(',') for l in pathlib.Path('my_file.csv').read_text().splitlines()})"
This counts the number of commas per line, then makes a set from them (so if your lines all have the same number of commas in, you'll get a set with just that number in).
Just remove all of the carriage returns:
tr -d "\r" old_file > new_file
What is the best way (better performance) to read a specific line of a file? Currently, I'm using the following command line:
head -line_number file_name | tail -1
ps.: preferentially, using shell tools.
You could use sed.
# print line number 10
$ sed -n '10p' file_name
$ sed '10!d' file_name
$ sed '10q;d' file_name
#print 10th line
awk NR==10 file_name
awk -v linenum=10 'NR == linenum {print; exit}' file
If you know the lines are the same length, then a program could directly index in to that line without reading all the preceeding ones: something like od might be able to do that, or you could code it up in half a dozen lines in most-any language. Look for a function called seek() or fseek().
Otherwise, perhaps...
tail +N | head -n 1
...as this asks tail to skip to the Nth line, and there are less lines put needlessly through the pipe than with your head to tail solution.
ruby -ne '$.==10 and (print; exit)' file
I've tried it couple of times to avoid the file cache and found the head + tail was quick but the ruby was the fastest:
$ wc -l myfile.txt
920391 myfile.txt
$ time awk NR==334227 myfile.txt
my_searched_line
real 0m14.963s
user 0m1.235s
sys 0m0.126s
$ time head -334227 myfile.txt |tail -1
my_searched_line
real 0m5.524s
user 0m0.569s
sys 0m0.725s
$ time sed '334227!d' myfile
my_searched_line
real 0m12.565s
user 0m0.814s
sys 0m0.398s
$ time ruby -ne '$.==334227 and (print; exit)' myfile
my_searched_line
real 0m0.750s
user 0m0.568s
sys 0m0.179s