Replace last line of XML file - bash

Question

Looking for help creating a script that will replace the last line of an XML file with a tag. I have a few hundred files so I'm looking for something that will process them in a loop. I've managed to rename the files sequentially like this:
posts1.xml
posts2.xml
posts3.xml
etc...
to make it easier to loop through. But I have no idea how to write a script to do this. I'm open to using either Linux or Windows (but i would guess that Linux is better for this kind of task).

Answer 1

So if you want to append a line to every file:
sed -i '$a<YOUR_SHINY_NEW_TAG>' *xml
To replace the last line:
sed -i '$s/.*/<YOUR_SHINY_NEW_TAG>/' *xml
But do note, sed is not the ideal tool to modify xml.

Answer 2

XMLStarlet is a command-line toolkit for performing XML parsing and manipulations. Note that as an XML-aware toolkit, it'll respect XML structure, character encoding and entity substitution.
Check out the ed command to see how to modify documents. You can wrap this in a standard bash loop.
e.g. in a doc consisting of a chain of <elem>s, you can add a following <added>5</added>:
mkdir new
for x in *.xml; do
xmlstarlet ed -a "//elem[count(//elem)]" -t elem -n added -v 5 $x > new/$x
done

Answer 3

Linux way using sed:
To edit the last line of the file in place, you can use sed:
sed -i '$s_pattern_replacement_' filename
To change the whole line to "replacement" use $s_.*_replacement_. Be sure to escape any _'s in replacement with a \.
To loop over files, just use for:
for f in /path/posts*.xml; do sed -i '$s_.*_replacement_' $f; done
This, however, is a dirty way as it's not aware of the XML structure, whereas the XML structure is not affected by newlines. You have to be sure the last line of the files contains exactly what you expect it to.

Answer 4

It makes little to no difference whether you're on Linux, Windows or MacOS
The question is what language do you want to use?
The following is an example in c# (not optimized, but read it as speudocode):
string rootDirectory = #"c:\myfiles";
var files = Directory.GetFiles(rootDirectory, "*.xml");
foreach (var file in files)
{
var lines = File.ReadAllLines(file);
lines[lines.Length - 1] = "whatever you want here";
File.WriteAllLines(file, lines);
}
You can compile this and run it on Windows, Linux, etc..
Or you could do the same in Python.
Of course this method does not actually parse the XML,
but you just wanted to replace the last line right?