I'm trying to trim a few lines from a file. I know exactly how many lines to remove (say, 2 from the top), but not how many total lines are in the file. So I tried this straightforward solution:
$ wc -l $FILENAME
119559 my_filename.txt
$ LINES=$(wc -l $FILENAME | awk '{print $1}')
$ tail -n $(($LINES - 2)) $FILENAME > $OUTPUT_FILE
The output is fine, but what happened to LINES??
$ wc -l $OUTPUT_FILE
119557 my_output_file.txt
$ echo $LINES
107
Hoping someone can help me understand what's going on.
$LINES has a special meaning. It is the number of rows the terminal has, and if you resize your terminal window, it will be re-set. See info "(bash)Bash Variables".
It always helps to decompose where you thing the problem is. Running
wc -l $FILENAME | awk '{print $1}'
should probably show you where the problem is.
Instead, use
LINES=$(wc -l < $FILENAME )
Hm.. Yes, I'm afraid #MichaelHoffman is probably has diagnosed your problem more accurately.
I hope this helps.
You could also just do sed 'X,Yd' < file
Where X,Y is the range of the lines you want to omit (in this case it would be 1,2).
Other alternatives are:
sed 'X,+Yd' omits Y lines starting from line X
sed /regex/,Yd' omits everything between the line where the regex matches and Y
sed '/regex/,+Yd' omits Y lines starting from where the regex matches
sed '/regex/,/regex/d' omits everything between the two regexs
Note: these are GNU sed extensions
Related
I have a text file which has over 60MB size. It has got entries in 5105043 lines, but when I am doing wc -l it is giving only 5105042 results which is one less than actual. Does anyone have any idea why it is happening?
Is it a common thing when the file size is large?
Last line does not contain a new line.
One trick to get the result you want would be:
sed -n '=' <yourfile> | wc -l
This tells sed just to print the line number of each line in your file which wc then counts. There are probably better solutions, but this works.
The last line in your file is probably missing a newline ending. IIRC, wc -l merely counts the number of newline characters in the file.
If you try: cat -A file.txt | tail does your last line contain a trailing dollar sign ($)?
EDIT:
Assuming the last line in your file is lacking a newline character, you can append a newline character to correct it like this:
printf "\n" >> file.txt
The results of wc -l should now be consistent.
60 MB seems a bit big file but for small size files. One option could be
cat -n file.txt
OR
cat -n sample.txt | cut -f1 | tail -1
I am trying to select the nth file in a folder of which the filename matches a certain pattern:
Ive tried using this with sed: e.g.,
sed -n 3p /path/to/files/pattern.txt
but it appears to return the 3rd line of the first matching file.
Ive also tried
sed -n 3p ls /path/to/files/*pattern*.txt
which doesnt work either.
Thanks!
Why sed, when bash is so much better at it?
Assuming some name n indicates the index you want:
Bash
files=(path/to/files/*pattern*.txt)
echo "${files[n]}"
Posix sh
i=0
for file in path/to/files/*pattern*.txt; do
if [ $i = $n ]; then
break
fi
i=$((i++))
done
echo "$file"
What's wrong with sed is that you would have to jump through many hoops to make it safe for the entire set of possible characters that can occur in a filename, and even if that doesn't matter to you you end up with a double-layer of subshells to get the answer.
file=$(printf '%s\n' path/to/files/*pattern*.txt | sed -n "$n"p)
Please, never parse ls.
ls -1 /path/to/files/*pattern*.txt | sed -n '3p'
or, if patterne is a regex pattern
ls -1 /path/to/files/ | egrep 'pattern' | sed -n '3p'
lot of other possibilities, it depend on performance or simplicity you look at
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
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