I am trying to print the paths that are located in a file .chsrc which is easy to print with just echo-ing $path, but I need to add something to the end of each path that is listed. Ie:
/opt/local/bin: /usr/ucb: /usr/bin:
I can not edit or change the .chsrc file. I also tried to find something on concatenating in C Shell, but that seems to not really "exist" in C Shell from what I read. I am sorry if I sound arrogant in anyway, I am new to C Shell. If anyone has any pointers, advice is always great! Thank you!
echo "$PATH" | sed 's/:/: /g;s/ *$//'
's/'=substitute, '/:/: /'=targetPattern/replacmentPattern, 'g'=do replacment globally (on the current line), ';'= command separator, 's/ *$//'= substitute any trailing spaces at the end-of-the line '$', replacementPattern='//'=(nothing, empty, nada, zilch;-)
Best to always echo any env var surrounded by dbl-quotes unless you want any spaces in the variable to cause word splitting in the commandline evaluatio. Especially with PATH, as space char is legal in a path.
In general, concatenation works like this in CSH
set var1 = text1
set var2 = myText
echo "someText "$var1 " more stuff"$var2
# -----------^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^--- deliberate, copy paste as is
I don't have a csh to print the output with, but cut and paste these lines and you'll see that spaces outside of " .... ", get reduced to 1 space, spaces inside of "...." stay in place, as many as you want, AND variables, bumped up next to "text Strings" do NOT insert a space char automatically, you have to put them in.
I don't see any arrogance in this question ;-)
But... before you spend 8+ years of your life using a 2nd rate shell ( ;-( ), read everything at A great Unix Primer , especially Why csh is less than perfect scripting language ;-)
P.S. Welcome to StackOverflow (S.O.) Please remeber to read the FAQs, http://tinyurl.com/2vycnvr , vote for good Q/A by using the gray triangles, http://i.imgur.com/kygEP.png , and to accept the one answer that best solves your problem, if any, by pressing the checkmark sign , http://i.imgur.com/uqJeW.png
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I've written a bunch of environment variables in Docker format, but now I want to use them outside of that context. How can I source them with one line of bash?
Details
Docker run and compose have a convenient facility for importing a set of environment variables from a file. That file has a very literal format.
The value is used as is and not modified at all. For example if the value is surrounded by quotes (as is often the case of shell variables), the quotes are included in the value passed
Lines beginning with # are treated as comments and are ignored
Blank lines are also ignored.
"If no = is provided and that variable is…exported in your local environment," docker "passes it to the container"
Thankfully, whitespace before the = will cause the run to fail
so, for example, this env-file:
# This is a comment, with an = sign, just to mess with us
VAR1=value1
VAR2=value2
USER
VAR3=is going to = trouble
VAR4=this $sign will mess with things
VAR5=var # with what looks like a comment
#VAR7 =would fail
VAR8= but what about this?
VAR9="and this?"
results in these env variables in the container:
user=ubuntu
VAR1=value1
VAR2=value2
VAR3=is going to = trouble
VAR4=this $sign will mess with things
VAR5=var # with what looks like a comment
VAR8= but what about this?
VAR9="and this?"
The bright side is that once I know what I'm working with, it's pretty easy to predict the effect. What I see is what I get. But I don't think bash would be able to interpret this in the same way without a lot of changes. How can I put this square Docker peg into a round Bash hole?
tl;dr:
source <(sed -E -e "s/^([^#])/export \1/" -e "s/=/='/" -e "s/(=.*)$/\1'/" env.list)
You're probably going to want to source a file, whose contents
are executed as if they were printed at the command line.
But what file? The raw docker env-file is inappropriate, because it won't export the assigned variables such that they can be used by child processes, and any of the input lines with spaces, quotes, and other special characters will have undesirable results.
Since you don't want to hand edit the file, you can use a stream editor to transform the lines to something more bash-friendly. I started out trying to solve this with one or two complex Perl 5 regular expressions, or some combination of tools, but I eventually settled on one sed command with one simple and two extended regular expressions:
sed -E -e "s/^([^#])/export \1/" -e "s/=/='/" -e "s/(=.*)$/\1'/" env.list
This does a lot.
The first expression prepends export to any line whose first character is anything but #.
As discussed, this makes the variables available to anything else you run in this session, your whole point of being here.
The second expression simply inserts a single-quote after the first = in a line, if applicable.
This will always enclose the whole value, whereas a greedy match could lop off some of (e.g.) VAR3, for example
The third expression appends a second quote to any line that has at least one =.
it's important here to match on the = again so we don't create an unmatched quotation mark
Results:
# This is a comment, with an =' sign, just to mess with us'
export VAR1='value1'
export VAR2='value2'
export USER
export VAR3='is going to = trouble'
export VAR4='this $sign will mess with things'
export VAR5='var # with what looks like a comment'
#VAR7 ='would fail'
export VAR8=' but what about this?'
export VAR9='"and this?"'
Some more details:
By wrapping the values in single-quotes, you've
prevented bash from assuming that the words after the space are a command
appropriately brought the # and all succeeding characters into the VAR5
prevented the evaluation of $sign, which, if wrapped in double-quotes, bash would have interpreted as a variable
Finally, we'll take advantage of process substitution to pass this stream as a file to source, bring all of this down to one line of bash.
source <(sed -E -e "s/^([^#])/export \1/" -e "s/=/='/" -e "s/(=.*)$/\1'/" env.list)
Et voilà!
I need to write a shell script such that I have to read .sh script and find a particular variable (for example, Variable_Name="variable1") and take out is value(variable1).
In other shell script if Variable_Name is used I need to replace it with its Value(variable1)
A simple approach, to build on, might be:
assignment=$(echo 'Variable_Name="variable1"' | sed -r 's/Variable_Name=(.*)/\1/')
echo $assignment
"variable1"
Depending on variable type, the value might be quoted or not, quoted with single apostrophs or quotes. That might be neccessary (String with or without blanks) or superflous. Behind the assignment there might be furter code:
pi=3.14;v=42;
or a comment:
user=janis # Janis Joplin
it might be complicated:
expr="foobar; O'Reilly " # trailing blank important
But only you may know, how complicated it might get. Maybe the simple case is already sufficient. If the new script looks similar, it might work, or not:
targetV=INSERT_HERE; secondV=23
# oops: secondV accidnetally hidden:
targetV="foobar; O'Reilly " # trailing blank important; secondV=23
If the second script is under your control, you can prevent such problems easily. If source and target language are identical, what worked here should work there too.
I have recently started studying shell script and I'd like to be able to comment out a set of lines in a shell script. I mean like it is in case of C/Java :
/* comment1
comment2
comment3
*/`
How could I do that?
Use : ' to open and ' to close.
For example:
: '
This is a
very neat comment
in bash
'
Multiline comment in bash
: <<'END_COMMENT'
This is a heredoc (<<) redirected to a NOP command (:).
The single quotes around END_COMMENT are important,
because it disables variable resolving and command resolving
within these lines. Without the single-quotes around END_COMMENT,
the following two $() `` commands would get executed:
$(gibberish command)
`rm -fr mydir`
comment1
comment2
comment3
END_COMMENT
Note: I updated this answer based on comments and other answers, so comments prior to May 22nd 2020 may no longer apply. Also I noticed today that some IDE's like VS Code and PyCharm do not recognize a HEREDOC marker that contains spaces, whereas bash has no problem with it, so I'm updating this answer again.
Bash does not provide a builtin syntax for multi-line comment but there are hacks using existing bash syntax that "happen to work now".
Personally I think the simplest (ie least noisy, least weird, easiest to type, most explicit) is to use a quoted HEREDOC, but make it obvious what you are doing, and use the same HEREDOC marker everywhere:
<<'###BLOCK-COMMENT'
line 1
line 2
line 3
line 4
###BLOCK-COMMENT
Single-quoting the HEREDOC marker avoids some shell parsing side-effects, such as weird subsitutions that would cause crash or output, and even parsing of the marker itself. So the single-quotes give you more freedom on the open-close comment marker.
For example the following uses a triple hash which kind of suggests multi-line comment in bash. This would crash the script if the single quotes were absent. Even if you remove ###, the FOO{} would crash the script (or cause bad substitution to be printed if no set -e) if it weren't for the single quotes:
set -e
<<'###BLOCK-COMMENT'
something something ${FOO{}} something
more comment
###BLOCK-COMMENT
ls
You could of course just use
set -e
<<'###'
something something ${FOO{}} something
more comment
###
ls
but the intent of this is definitely less clear to a reader unfamiliar with this trickery.
Note my original answer used '### BLOCK COMMENT', which is fine if you use vanilla vi/vim but today I noticed that PyCharm and VS Code don't recognize the closing marker if it has spaces.
Nowadays any good editor allows you to press ctrl-/ or similar, to un/comment the selection. Everyone definitely understands this:
# something something ${FOO{}} something
# more comment
# yet another line of comment
although admittedly, this is not nearly as convenient as the block comment above if you want to re-fill your paragraphs.
There are surely other techniques, but there doesn't seem to be a "conventional" way to do it. It would be nice if ###> and ###< could be added to bash to indicate start and end of comment block, seems like it could be pretty straightforward.
After reading the other answers here I came up with the below, which IMHO makes it really clear it's a comment. Especially suitable for in-script usage info:
<< ////
Usage:
This script launches a spaceship to the moon. It's doing so by
leveraging the power of the Fifth Element, AKA Leeloo.
Will only work if you're Bruce Willis or a relative of Milla Jovovich.
////
As a programmer, the sequence of slashes immediately registers in my brain as a comment (even though slashes are normally used for line comments).
Of course, "////" is just a string; the number of slashes in the prefix and the suffix must be equal.
I tried the chosen answer, but found when I ran a shell script having it, the whole thing was getting printed to screen (similar to how jupyter notebooks print out everything in '''xx''' quotes) and there was an error message at end. It wasn't doing anything, but: scary. Then I realised while editing it that single-quotes can span multiple lines. So.. lets just assign the block to a variable.
x='
echo "these lines will all become comments."
echo "just make sure you don_t use single-quotes!"
ls -l
date
'
what's your opinion on this one?
function giveitauniquename()
{
so this is a comment
echo "there's no need to further escape apostrophes/etc if you are commenting your code this way"
the drawback is it will be stored in memory as a function as long as your script runs unless you explicitly unset it
only valid-ish bash allowed inside for instance these would not work without the "pound" signs:
1, for #((
2, this #wouldn't work either
function giveitadifferentuniquename()
{
echo nestable
}
}
Here's how I do multiline comments in bash.
This mechanism has two advantages that I appreciate. One is that comments can be nested. The other is that blocks can be enabled by simply commenting out the initiating line.
#!/bin/bash
# : <<'####.block.A'
echo "foo {" 1>&2
fn data1
echo "foo }" 1>&2
: <<'####.block.B'
fn data2 || exit
exit 1
####.block.B
echo "can't happen" 1>&2
####.block.A
In the example above the "B" block is commented out, but the parts of the "A" block that are not the "B" block are not commented out.
Running that example will produce this output:
foo {
./example: line 5: fn: command not found
foo }
can't happen
Simple solution, not much smart:
Temporarily block a part of a script:
if false; then
while you respect syntax a bit, please
do write here (almost) whatever you want.
but when you are
done # write
fi
A bit sophisticated version:
time_of_debug=false # Let's set this variable at the beginning of a script
if $time_of_debug; then # in a middle of the script
echo I keep this code aside until there is the time of debug!
fi
in plain bash
to comment out
a block of code
i do
:||{
block
of code
}
This question already has answers here:
When to wrap quotes around a shell variable?
(5 answers)
Closed 7 years ago.
I want to create some scripts for filling some templates and inserting them into my project folder. I want to use a shell script for this, and the templates are very small so I want to embed them in the shell script. The problem is that echo seems to ignore the line breaks in my string. Either that, or the string doesn't contain line breaks to begin with. Here is an example:
MY_STRING="
Hello, world! This
Is
A
Multi lined
String."
echo -e $MY_STRING
This outputs:
Hello, world! This Is A Multi lined String.
I'm assuming echo is the culprit here. How can I get it to acknowledge the line breaks?
You need double quotes around the variable interpolation.
echo -e "$MY_STRING"
This is an all-too common error. You should get into the habit of always quoting strings, unless you specifically need to split into whitespace-separated tokens or have wildcards expanded.
So to be explicit, the shell will normalize whitespace when it parses your command line. You can see this if you write a simple C program which prints out its argv array.
argv[0]='Hello,'
argv[1]='world!'
argv[2]='This'
argv[3]='Is'
argv[4]='A'
argv[5]='Multi'
argv[6]='lined'
argv[7]='String.'
By contrast, with quoting, the whole string is in argv[0], newlines and all.
For what it's worth, also consider here documents (with cat, not echo):
cat <<"HERE"
foo
Bar
HERE
You can also interpolate a variable in a here document.
cat <<HERE
$MY_STRING
HERE
... although in this particular case, it's hardly what you want.
echo is so nineties. The new (POSIX) kid on the block is printf.
printf '%s\n' "$MY_STRING"
No -e or SYSV vs BSD echo madness and full control over what gets printed where and how wide, escape sequences like in C. Everybody please start using printf now and never look back.
Try this :
echo "$MY_STRING"
This question already has answers here:
Why a variable assignment replaces tabs with spaces
(2 answers)
Closed 7 years ago.
I'm having some troubles with the printf function in bash.
I wrote a little script on which I pass a name and two letters (such as "sh", "py", "ht") and it creates a file in the current working directory named "name.extension".
For instance, if I execute seed test py a file named test.py is created in the current working dir with the shebang #!/usr/bin/python3.
So far, so good, nothing fancy: I'm learning shell scripting and I thought this could be a simple exercise to test the knowledge gained so far.
The problem is when I want to create an HTML file. This is the function that I use:
creaHtml(){
head='<!--DOCTYPE html-->\n<html>\n\t<head>\n\t\t<meta charset=\"UTF-8\">\n\t</head>\n\t<body>\n\t</body>\n</html>'
percorso=$CARTELLA_CORRENTE/$NOME_FILE.html
printf $head>>$percorso
chmod 755 $percorso
}
If I run, for instance, seed test ht the correct function (creaHtml) is called, test.html is created but if I try to look into it I only see:
<!--DOCTYPE
And nothing else.
This is the trace for that function:
[sviluppo:~/bin]$ seed test ht
+ creaHtml
+ head='<!--DOCTYPE html-->\n<html>\n\t<head>\n\t\t<meta charset=\"UTF-8\">\n\t</head>\n\t<body>\n\t</body>\n</html>'
+ percorso=/home/sviluppo/bin/test.html
+ printf '<!--DOCTYPE' 'html-->\n<html>\n\t<head>\n\t\t<meta' 'charset=\"UTF-8\">\n\t</head>\n\t<body>\n\t</body>\n</html>'
+ chmod 755 /home/sviluppo/bin/test.html
+ set +x
However, if I try to run printf '<!--DOCTYPE html-->\n<html>\n\t<head>\n\t\t<meta charset=\"UTF-8\">\n\t</head>\n\t<body>\n\t</body>\n</html>' from the terminal, I see the correct output: the "skeleton" of an HTML file neatly displayed with indentation and everything. What am I missing here?
Try echo -e instead of printf. printf is for printing formatted strings. Since you didn't protect $head with quotes, bash splits the string to form the command. The first word (before first white space) forms the format string. The rest are just arguments for things you didn't specify to print.
echo -e "$head" > "$percorso"
The -e evaluates your \n into newlines. I changed your >> to > since it looks like you want this to be the whole file, rather than append to any existing file you might have.
You have to be careful with quotes in bash. One thing can become many things. This actually makes it more powerful, but it can be confusing for people learning. Notice that I also put the file name "$percorso" in double quotes too. This evaluates the variable and makes sure that it ends up as one thing. If you use single quotes, it will be one word, but not evaluated. Unlike Python, there is a big difference between single and double quotes.
If you want to use printf for compatibility as #chepner pointed out, just be sure to quote it:
printf "$head" > "$percorso"
Actually that is much simpler anyway.