Bash curl and variable in the middle of the url - bash

I would need to read certain data using curl. I'm basically reading keywords from file
while read line
do
curl 'https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/'"${line}"'/subscriptions?v=2&alt=json' \
> '/home/user/archive/'"$line"
done < textfile.txt
Anyway I haven't found a way to form the url to curl so it would work. I've tried like every possible single and double quoted versions. I've tried basically:
'...'"$line"'...'
"..."${line}"..."
'...'$line'...'
and so on.. Just name it and I'm pretty sure that I've tried it.
When I'm printing out the URL in the best case it will be formed as:
/subscriptions?v=2&alt=jsoneeds/api/users/KEYWORD FROM FILE
or something similar. If you know what could be the cause of this I would appreciate the information. Thanks!

It's not a quoting issue. The problem is that your keyword file is in DOS format -- that is, each line ends with carriage return & linefeed (\r\n) rather than just linefeed (\n). The carriage return is getting read into the line variable, and included in the URL. The giveaway is that when you echo it, it appears to print:
/subscriptions?v=2&alt=jsoneeds/api/users/KEYWORD FROM FILE"
but it's really printing:
https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/KEYWORD FROM FILE
/subscriptions?v=2&alt=json
...with just a carriage return between them, so the second overwrites the first.
So what can you do about it? Here's a fairly easy way to trim the cr at the end of the line:
cr=$'\r'
while read line
do
line="${line%$cr}"
curl "https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/${line}/subscriptions?v=2&alt=json" \
> "/home/user/archive/$line"
done < textfile.txt

Your current version should work, I think. More elegant is to use a single pair of double quotes around the whole URL with the variable in ${}:
"https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/${line}/subscriptions?v=2&alt=json"

Just use it like this, should be sufficient enough:
curl "https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/${line}/subscriptions?v=2&alt=json" > "/home/user/archive/${line}"
If your shell gives you issues with & just put \&, but it works fine for me without it.

If the data from the file can contain spaces and you have no objection to spaces in the file name in the /home/user/archive directory, then what you've got should be OK.
Given the contents of the rest of the URL, you could even just write:
while read line
do
curl "https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/${line}/subscriptions?v=2&alt=json" \
> "/home/user/archive/${line}"
done < textfile.txt
where strictly the ${line} could be just $line in both places. This works because the strings are fixed and don't contain shell metacharacters.
Since you're code is close to this, but you claim that you're seeing the keywords from the file in the wrong place, maybe a little rewriting for ease of debugging is in order:
while read line
do
url="https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/${line}/subscriptions?v=2&alt=json"
file="/home/user/archive/${line}"
curl "$url" > "$file"
done < textfile.txt
Since the strings may end up containing spaces, it seems (do you need to expand spaces to + in the URL?), the quotes around the variables are strongly recommended. You can now run the script with sh -x (or add a line set -x to the script) and see what the shell thinks it is doing as it is doing it.

Related

Renaming the file Directory which contains Space based on CSV in Shell

I need to rename the files inside the folder that has a space in it eg(Deco/main library/file1.txt )
code:
while IFS="," read orig new pat
do
mv -v $pat$new $pat$orig
done < new.csv
csv file:
newname,file1.txt,Deco/main\\\ library/
error:
mv: invalid option -- '\'
Welcome to Stackoverflow!
First: Use quotes around the use of variables. That means except in very rare occasions, you always should use "$foo" instead of $foo because if you are using the latter, the shell is supposed (and will) interpret spaces in the variables as word delimiters which you rarely want. Especially in your case you do not want it.
Second: Your CSV file seems to contain backslashes to quote the spaces. And some additional step seems to have added another level of quotation so than now you end up with three backslashes and a space for each original space. If this really is the case (please double check if what you wrote in your question is correct, otherwise my answer doesn't fit), you need to unquote this before you can use it.
There are security issues involved in using eval, so do not use it lightly (this disclaimer is necessary whenever proposing to use eval), but if you have trust in the input you are handling to not contain any nastinesses, then you can do this using this code:
while IFS="," read orig new pat
do
eval eval mv -v "$pat$new" "$pat$orig"
done < new.csv
Using this, two levels of quotation are evaluated (that's what eval does) before the mv command is executed.
I strongly suggest to do a dry run by adding echo before the mv first. Then instead of executing your commands they are merely printed first.

Printf splits a string at spaces using Bash [duplicate]

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.

Assign BASH variable from file with specific criteria

A config file that the last line contains data that I want to assign everything to the RIGHT of the = sign into a variable that I can display and call later in the script.
Example: /path/to/magic.conf:
foo
bar
ThisOption=foo.bar.address:location.555
What would be the best method in a bash shell script to read the last line of the file and assign everything to the right of the equal sign? In this case, foo.bar.address:location.555.
The last line always has what I want to target and there will only ever be a single = sign in the file that happens to be the last line.
Google and searching here yielded many close but non-relative results with using sed/awk but I couldn't come up with exactly what I'm looking for.
Use sed:
variable=$(sed -n 's/^ThisOption=//p' /path/to/magic.conf)
echo "The option is: $variable")
This works by finding and removing the ThisOption= marker at the start of the line, and printing the result.
IMPORTANT: This method absolutely requires that the file be trusted 100%. As mentioned in the comments, anytime you "eval" code without any sanitization there are grave risks (a la "rm -rf /" magnitude - don't run that...)
Pure, simple bash. (well...using the tail utility :-) )
The advantage of this method, is that it only requires you to know that it will be the last line of the file, it does not require you to know any information about that line (such as what the variable to the left of the = sign will be - information that you'd need in order to use the sed option)
assignment_line=$(tail -n 1 /path/to/magic.conf)
eval ${assignment_line}
var_name=${assignment_line%%=*}
var_to_give_that_value=${!var_name}
Of course, if the var that you want to have the value is the one that is listed on the left side of the "=" in the file then you can skip the last assignment and just use "${!var_name}" wherever you need it.

use sed with for loop to delete lines from text file

I am essentially trying to use sed to remove a few lines within a text document. To clean it up. But I'm not getting it right at all. Missing something and I have no idea what...
#!/bin/bash
items[0]='X-Received:'
items[1]='Path:'
items[2]='NNTP-Posting-Date:'
items[3]='Organization:'
items[4]='MIME-Version:'
items[5]='References:'
items[6]='In-Reply-To:'
items[7]='Message-ID:'
items[8]='Lines:'
items[9]='X-Trace:'
items[10]='X-Complaints-To:'
items[11]='X-DMCA-Complaints-To:'
items[12]='X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info:'
items[13]='X-Postfilter:'
items[14]='Bytes:'
items[15]='X-Original-Bytes:'
items[16]='Content-Type:'
items[17]='Content-Transfer-Encoding:'
items[18]='Xref:'
for f in "${items[#]}"; do
sed '/${f}/d' "$1"
done
What I am thinking, incorrectly it seems, is that I can setup a for loop to check each item in the array that I want removed from the text file. But it's simply not working. Any idea. Sure this is basic and simple and yet I can't figure it out.
Thanks,
Marek
Much better to create a single sed script, rather than generate 19 small scripts in sequence.
Fortunately, generating a script by joining the array elements is moderately easy in Bash:
regex=$(printf '\|%s' "${items[#]}")
regex=${regex#'\|'}
sed "/^$regex/d" "$1"
(Notice also the addition of ^ to the final regex -- I assume you only want to match at beginning of line.)
Properly, you should not delete any lines from the message body, so the script should leave anything after the first empty line alone:
sed "1,/^\$/!b;/$regex/d" "$1"
Add -i if you want in-place editing of the target file.

bash templating

i have a template, with a var LINK
and a data file, links.txt, with one url per line
how in bash i can substitute LINK with the content of links.txt?
if i do
#!/bin/bash
LINKS=$(cat links.txt)
sed "s/LINKS/$LINK/g" template.xml
two problem:
$LINKS has the content of links.txt without newline
sed: 1: "s/LINKS/http://test ...": bad flag in substitute command: '/'
sed is not escaping the // in the links.txt file
thanks
Use some better language instead. I'd write a solution for bash + awk... but that's simply too much effort to go into. (See http://www.gnu.org/manual/gawk/gawk.html#Getline_002fVariable_002fFile if you really want to do that)
Just use any language where you don't have to mix control and content text. For example in python:
#!/usr/bin/env python
links = open('links.txt').read()
template = open('template.xml').read()
print template.replace('LINKS', links)
Watch out if you're trying to force sed solution with some other separator - you'll get into the same problems unless you find something disallowed in urls (but are you verifying that?) If you don't, you already have another problem - links can contain < and > and break your xml.
You can do this using ed:
ed template.xml <<EOF
/LINKS/d
.r links.txt
w output.txt
EOF
The first command will go to the line
containing LINKS and delete it.
The second line will insert the
contents of links.txt on the current
line.
The third command will write the file
to output.txt (if you omit output.txt
the edits will be saved to
template.xml).
Try running sed twice. On the first run, replace / with \/. The second run will be the same as what you currently have.
The character following the 's' in the sed command ends up the separator, so you'll want to use a character that is not present in the value of $LINK. For example, you could try a comma:
sed "s,LINKS,${LINK}\n,g" template.xml
Note that I also added a \n to add an additional newline.
Another option is to escape the forward slashes in $LINK, possibly using sed. If you don't have guarantees about the characters in $LINK, this may be safer.

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