Basename puts single quotes around variable - macos

I am writing a simple shell script to make automated backups, and I am trying to use basename to create a list of directories and them parse this list to get the first and the last directory from the list.
The problem is: when I use basename in the terminal, all goes fine and it gives me the list exactly as I want it. For example:
basename -a /var/*/
gives me a list of all the directories inside /var without the / in the end of the name, one per line.
BUT, when I use it inside a script and pass a variable to basename, it puts single quotes around the variable:
while read line; do
dir_name=$(echo $line)
basename -a $dir_name/*/ > dir_list.tmp
done < file_with_list.txt
When running with +x:
+ basename -a '/Volumes/OUTROS/backup/test/*/'
and, therefore, the result is not what I need.
Now, I know there must be a thousand ways to go around the basename problem, but then I'd learn nothing, right? ;)
How to get rid of the single quotes?
And if my directory name has spaces in it?

If your directory name could include spaces, you need to quote the value of dir_name (which is a good idea for any variable expansion, whether you expect spaces or not).
while read line; do
dir_name=$line
basename -a "$dir_name"/*/ > dir_list.tmp
done < file_with_list.txt
(As jordanm points out, you don't need to quote the RHS of a variable assignment.)

Assuming your goal is to populate dir_list.tmp with a list of directories found under each directory listed in file_with_list.txt, this might do.
#!/bin/bash
inputfile=file_with_list.txt
outputfile=dir_list.tmp
rm -f "$outputfile" # the -f makes rm fail silently if file does not exist
while read line; do
# basic syntax checking
if [[ ! ${line} =~ ^/[a-z][a-z0-9/-]*$ ]]; then
continue
fi
# collect targets using globbing
for target in "$line"/*; do
if [[ -d "$target" ]]; then
printf "%s\n" "$target" >> $outputfile
fi
done
done < $inputfile
As you develop whatever tool will process your dir_list.tmp file, be careful of special characters (including spaces) in that file.
Note that I'm using printf instead of echo so that targets whose first character is a hyphen won't cause errors.

This might work
while read; do
find "$REPLY" >> dir_list.tmp
done < file_with_list.txt

Related

Bash script MV is disappearing files

I've written a script to go through all the files in the directory the script is located in, identify if a file name contains a certain string and then modify the filename. When I run this script, the files that are supposed to be modified are disappearing. It appears my usage of the mv command is incorrect and the files are likely going to an unknown directory.
#!/bin/bash
string_contains="dummy_axial_y_position"
string_dontwant="dummy_axial_y_position_time"
file_extension=".csv"
for FILE in *
do
if [[ "$FILE" == *"$string_contains"* ]];then
if [[ "$FILE" != *"$string_dontwant"* ]];then
filename= echo $FILE | head -c 15
combined_name="$filename$file_extension"
echo $combined_name
mv $FILE $combined_name
echo $FILE
fi
fi
done
I've done my best to go through the possible errors I've made in the MV command but I haven't had any success so far.
There are a couple of problems and several places where your script can be improved.
filename= echo $FILE | head -c 15
This pipeline runs echo $FILE adding the variable filename having the null string as value in its environment. This value of the variable is visible only to the echo command, the variable is not set in the current shell. echo does not care about it anyway.
You probably want to capture the output of echo $FILE | head -c 15 into the variable filename but this is not the way to do it.
You need to use command substitution for this purpose:
filename=$(echo $FILE | head -c 15)
head -c outputs only the first 15 characters of the input file (they can be on multiple lines but this does not happen here). head is not the most appropriate way for this. Use cut -c-15 instead.
But for what you need (extract the first 15 characters of the value stored in the variable $FILE), there is a much simpler way; use a form of parameter expansion called "substring expansion":
filename=${FILE:0:15}
mv $FILE $combined_name
Before running mv, the variables $FILE and $combined_name are expanded (it is called "parameter expansion"). This means that the variable are replaced by their values.
For example, if the value of FILE is abc def and the value of combined_name is mnp opq, the line above becomes:
mv abc def mnp opq
The mv command receives 4 arguments and it attempts to move the files denoted by the first three arguments into the directory denoted by the fourth argument (and it probably fails).
In order to keep the values of the variables as single words (if they contain spaces), always enclose them in double quotes. The correct command is:
mv "$FILE" "$combined_name"
This way, in the example above, the command becomes:
mv "abc def" "mnp opq"
... and mv is invoked with two arguments: abc def and mnp opq.
combined_name="$filename$file_extension"
There isn't any problem in this line. The quotes are simply not needed.
The variables filename and file_extension are expanded (replaced by their values) but on assignments word splitting is not applied. The value resulted after the replacement is the value assigned to variable combined_name, even if it contains spaces or other word separator characters (spaces, tabs, newlines).
The quotes are also not needed here because the values do not contain spaces or other characters that are special in the command line. They must be quoted if they contain such characters.
string_contains="dummy_axial_y_position"
string_dontwant="dummy_axial_y_position_time"
file_extension=".csv"
It is not not incorrect to quote the values though.
for FILE in *
do
if [[ "$FILE" == *"$string_contains"* ]];then
if [[ "$FILE" != *"$string_dontwant"* ]]; then
This is also not wrong but it is inefficient.
You can use the expression from the if condition directly in the for statement (and get rid of the if statement):
for FILE in *"$string_contains"*; do
if [[ "$FILE" != *"$string_dontwant"* ]]; then
...
If you have read and understood the above (and some of the linked documentation) you will be able to figure out yourself where were your files moved :-)

Adding test_ in front of a file name with path

I have a list of files stored in a text file, and if a Python file is found in that list. I want to the corresponding test file using Pytest.
My file looks like this:
/folder1/file1.txt
/folder1/file2.jpg
/folder1/file3.md
/folder1/file4.py
/folder1/folder2/file5.py
When 4th/5th files are found, I want to run the command pytest like:
pytest /folder1/test_file4.py
pytest /folder1/folder2/test_file5.py
Currently, I am using this command:
cat /workspace/filelist.txt | while read line; do if [[ $$line == *.py ]]; then exec "pytest test_$${line}"; fi; done;
which is not working correctly, as I have file path in the text as well. Any idea how to implement this?
Using Bash's variable substring removal to add the test_. One-liner:
$ while read line; do if [[ $line == *.py ]]; then echo "pytest ${line%/*}/test_${line##*/}"; fi; done < file
In more readable form:
while read line
do
if [[ $line == *.py ]]
then
echo "pytest ${line%/*}/test_${line##*/}"
fi
done < file
Output:
pytest /folder1/test_file4.py
pytest /folder1/folder2/test_file5.py
Don't know anything about the Google Cloudbuild so I'll let you experiment with the double dollar signs.
Update:
In case there are files already with test_ prefix, use this bash script that utilizes extglob in variable substring removal:
shopt -s extglob # notice
while read line
do
if [[ $line == *.py ]]
then
echo "pytest ${line%/*}/test_${line##*/?(test_)}" # notice
fi
done < file
You can easily refactor all your conditions into a simple sed script. This also gets rid of the useless cat and the similarly useless exec.
sed -n 's%[^/]*\.py$%test_&%p' /workspace/filelist.txt |
xargs -n 1 pytest
The regular expression matches anything after the last slash, which means the entire line if there is no slash; we include the .py suffix to make sure this only matches those files.
The pipe to xargs is a common way to convert standard input into command-line arguments. The -n 1 says to pass one argument at a time, rather than as many as possible. (Maybe pytest allows you to specify many tests; then, you can take out the -n 1 and let xargs pass in as many as it can fit.)
If you want to avoid adding the test_ prefix to files which already have it, one solution is to break up the sed script into two separate actions:
sed -n '/test_[^/]*\.py/p;t;s%[^/]*\.py$%test_&%p' /workspace/filelist.txt |
xargs -n 1 pytest
The first p simply prints the matches verbatim; the t says if that matched, skip the rest of the script for this input.
(MacOS / BSD sed will want a newline instead of a semicolon after the t command.)
sed is arguably a bit of a read-only language; this is already pressing towards the boundary where perhaps you would rewrite this in Awk instead.
You may want to focus on lines that ends with ".py" string
You can achieve that using grep combined with a regex so you can figure out if a line ends with .py - that eliminates the if statement.
IFS=$'\n'
for file in $(cat /workspace/filelist.txt|grep '\.py$');do pytest $file;done

Checking if substring is in filename in bash

I'm trying to create a script that identifies the names of files in a directory and then checks to see if a string is a substring of the name. I'm doing this in bash and cannot use the grep command. Any thoughts?
I have the following code to check if a user submission matches a file name or a string in the name.
read -p name
for file in sample/*; do
echo $(basename "$file")
if [[$(basename "$file") ~= $name]];
then echo "invalid"
fi
done
You can just interpolate the user input into the wildcard.
printf '%s\n' sample/*"$name"*
If you want to loop over the matches, try
for file in sample/*"$name"*; do
# cope with nullglob
test -e "$file" || break
: do things with "$file"
done
If you just need to check that the name isn't a substring of an existing file's name:
valid=true
for file in sample/*"$name"*; do
test -e "$file" && valid=false
done
echo "$name is valid? $valid"
The shell by default does not expand a wildcard which doesn't match any files; so in this case, your loop will run once, but the loop variable will not match any existing file. You might also want to look at the nullglob option in Bash to make it loop zero times in this case.

Using Variables with grep, and an IF statement regarding this

I am looking to search for strings within a file using variables.
I have a script that will accept 3 or 4 parameters: 3 are required; the 4th isn't mandatory.
I would like to search the text file for the 3 parameters matching within the same line, and if they do match then I want to remove that line and replace it with my new one - basically it would update the 4th parameter if set, and avoid duplicate entries.
Currently this is what I have:
input=$(egrep -e '$domain\s+$type\s+$item' ~/etc/security/limits.conf)
if [ "$input" == "" ]; then
echo $domain $type $item $value >>~/etc/security/limits.conf
echo \"$domain\" \"$type\" \"$item\" \"$value\" has been successfully added to your limits.conf file.
else
cat ~/etc/security/limits.conf | egrep -v "$domain|$type|$item" >~/etc/security/limits.conf1
rm -rf ~/etc/security/limits.conf
mv ~/etc/security/limits.conf1 ~/etc/security/limits.conf
echo $domain $type $item $value >>~/etc/security/limits.conf
echo \"$domain\" \"$type\" \"$item\" \"$value\" has been successfully added to your limits.conf file.
exit 0
fi
Now I already know that the input=egrep etc.. will not work; it works if I hard code some values, but it won't accept those variables. Basically I have domain=$1, type=$2 and so on.
I would like it so that if all 3 variables are not matched within one line, than it will just append the parameters to the end of the file, but if the parameters do match, then I want them to be deleted, and appended to the file. I know I can use other things like sed and awk, but I have yet to learn them.
This is for a school assignment, and all help is very much appreciated, but I'd also like to learn why and how it works/doesn't, so if you can provide answers to that as well that would be great!
Three things:
To assign the output of a command, use var=$(cmd).
Don't put spaces around the = in assignments.
Expressions don't expand in single quotes: use double quotes.
To summarize:
input=$(egrep -e "$domain\s+$type\s+$item" ~/etc/security/limits.conf)
Also note that ~ is your home directory, so if you meant /etc/security/limits.conf and not /home/youruser/etc/security/limits.conf, leave off the ~
You have several bugs in your script. Here's your script with some comments added
input=$(egrep -e '$domain\s+$type\s+$item' ~/etc/security/limits.conf)
# use " not ' in the string above or the shell can't expand your variables.
# some versions of egrep won't understand '\s'. The safer, POSIX character class is [[:blank:]].
if [ "$input" == "" ]; then
# the shell equality test operator is =, not ==. Some shells will also take == but don't count on it.
# the normal way to check for a variable being empty in shell is with `-z`
# you can have problems with tests in some shells if $input is empty, in which case you'd use [ "X$input" = "X" ].
echo $domain $type $item $value >>~/etc/security/limits.conf
# echo is unsafe and non-portable, you should use printf instead.
# the above calls echo with 4 args, one for each variable - you probably don't want that and should have double-quoted the whole thing.
# always double-quote your shell variables to avoid word splitting ad file name expansion (google those - you don't want them happening here!)
echo \"$domain\" \"$type\" \"$item\" \"$value\" has been successfully added to your limits.conf file.
# the correct form would be:
# printf '"%s" "%s" "%s" "%s" has been successfully added to your limits.conf file.\n' "$domain" "$type" "$item" "$value"
else
cat ~/etc/security/limits.conf | egrep -v "$domain|$type|$item" >~/etc/security/limits.conf1
# Useless Use Of Cat (UUOC - google it). [e]grep can open files just as easily as cat can.
rm -rf ~/etc/security/limits.conf
# -r is for recursively removing files in a directory - inappropriate and misleading when used on a single file.
mv ~/etc/security/limits.conf1 ~/etc/security/limits.conf
# pointless to remove the file above when you're overwriting it here anyway
# If your egrep above failed to create your temp file (e.g. due to memory or permissions issues) then the "mv" above would zap your real file. the correct way to do this is:
# egrep regexp file > tmp && mv tmp file
# i.e. use && to only do the mv if creating the tmp file succeeded.
echo $domain $type $item $value >>~/etc/security/limits.conf
# see previous echo comments.
echo \"$domain\" \"$type\" \"$item\" \"$value\" has been successfully added to your limits.conf file.
# ditto
exit 0
# pointless and misleading having an explicit "exit <success>" when that's what the script will do by default anyway.
fi
This line:
input=$(egrep -e '$domain\s+$type\s+$item' ~/etc/security/limits.conf)
requires double quotes around the regex to allow the shell to interpolate the variable values.
input=$(egrep -e "$domain\s+$type\s+$item" ~/etc/security/limits.conf)
You need to be careful with backslashes; you probably don't have to double them up in this context, but you should be sure you know why.
You should be aware that your first egrep commands is much more restrictive in what it selects than the second egrep which is used to delete data from the file. The first requires the entry with the three fields in the single line; the second only requires a match with any one of the words (and that could be part of a larger word) to delete the line.
Since ~/etc/security/limits.conf is a file, there is no need to use the -r option of rm; it is advisable not to use the -r unless you intend to remove directories.

Renaming a file extension without specifying

I am creating a bash shell script that will rename a file extension without having to specify the old file extension name. If I enter "change foo *" to the Terminal in Linux, it will change all file extension to foo.
So lets say I've got four files: "file1.txt", "file2.txt.txt", "file3.txt.txt.txt" and "file4."
When I run the command, the files should look like this: "file1.foo", "file2.txt.foo", "file3.txt.txt.foo" and "file4.foo"
Can someone look at my code and correct it. I would also appreciate it if someone can implement this for me.
#!/bin/bash
shift
ext=$1
for file in "$#"
do
cut=`echo $FILE |sed -n '/^[a-Z0-9]*\./p'`
if test "${cut}X" == 'X'; then
new="$file.$ext"
else
new=`echo $file | sed "s/\(.*\)\..*/\1.$ext/"`
fi
mv $file $new
done
exit
Always use double quotes around variable substitutions, e.g. echo "$FILE" and not echo $FILE. Without double quotes, the shell expands whitespace and glob characters (\[*?) in the value of the variable. (There are cases where you don't need the quotes, and sometimes you do want word splitting, but that's for a future lesson.)
I'm not sure what you're trying to do with sed, but whatever it is, I'm sure it's doable in the shell.
To check if $FILE contains a dot: case "$FILE" in *.*) echo yes;; *) echo no;; esac
To strip the last extension from $FILE: ${FILE%.*}. For example, if $FILE is file1.txt.foo, this produces file1.txt. More generally, ${FILE%SOME_PATTERN} expands to $FILE with a the shortest suffix matching SOME_PATTERN stripped off. If there is no matching suffix, it expands to $FILE unchanged. The variant ${FILE%%SOME_PATTERN} strips the longest suffix. Similarly, ${FILE#SOME_PATTERN} and ${FILE##SOME_PATTERN} strip a suffix.
test "${TEMP}X" == 'X' is weird. This looks like a misremembered trick from the old days. The normal way of writing this is [ "$TEMP" = "" ] or [ -z "$TEMP" ]. Using == instead of = is a bash extension. There used to be buggy shells that might parse the command incorrectly if $TEMP looked like an operator, but these have gone the way of the dinosaur, and even then, the X needs to be at the beginning, because the problematic operators begin with a -: [ "X$TEMP" == "X" ].
If a file name begins with a -, mv will think it's an option. Use -- to say “that's it, no more options, whatever follows is an operand”: mv -- "$FILE" "$NEW_FILE".
This is very minor, but a common (not universal) convention is to use capital letters for environment variables and lowercase letters for internal script variables.
Since you're using only standard shell features, you can start the script with #!/bin/sh (but #!/bin/bash works too, of course).
exit at the end of the script is useless.
Applying all of these, here's the resulting script.
#!/bin/sh
ext="$1"; shift
for file in "$#"; do
base="${file%.*}"
mv -- "$file" "$base.$ext"
done
Not exactly what you are asking about, but have a look at the perl rename utility. Very powerful! man rename is a good start.
Use: for file in *.gif; do mv $file ${file%.gif}.jpg; done
Or see How to rename multiple files
For me this worked
for FILE in `ls`
do
NEW_FILE=${FILE%.*}
NEW_FILE=${NEW_FILE}${EXT}
done
I just want to tell about NEW_FILE=${FILE%.*}.
Here NEW_FILE gets the file name as output. You can use it as you want.
I tested in bash with uname -a = "Linux 2.4.20-8smp #1 SMP Thu Mar 13 17:45:54 EST 2003 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux"

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