I am looking for a Windows tool (exe) or Python script which can be used on the command line to search and replace strings in text files recursively in a source code tree. I am trying to avoid the custom syntax of sed/awd like linux tools. It needs to be automated, therefore it needs to be command line.
Any suggestions?
I think WinGrep may meet your needs. I believe it can be run from the command line. Link: www.wingrep.com
A little pricey, but PowerGrep has a command line interface or so the manual says.
There is fnr.exe, which is a lightweight utility that supports command line. It doesn't have as many features as grep, but it makes it easy to generate command line script by providing all the parameters in windows form. It is available from here:
http://findandreplace.codeplex.com
NotePad++ worked great. Free add-in.
Search - Find in files...
sed -i%TEMP%\* "s/regexp/replacement/g" *.txt
Backup files will be in temp directory.
Sed can be easily downloaded with chocolatey:
https://chocolatey.org/packages/sed
Related
On a windows script i need to replace entire line number of a file (eg: line number 15) with the contents of a variable.
I don´t have a string to search for it will depend of the file but the line number is always the same.
The file in question is of type xml, if necessary i can install any tool that could help me doing this using the windows scripting.
I am out of options, once i see many options of achieving this on linux but not on windows.
Already tried find and replace but since my files are different i don´t have a search pattern
As you seem in dire straits, there are standalone versions the unix/linux sed utility for windows you can install without requiring cygwin or MSYS2 etc.
Sorry, I can't provide a link. It will be better for you to search as you're aware of your local OS version and any other details that might impact which version you select.
But
echo "1
> 2
> 3
> 4" | sed '3s/.*/Something/'
output
1
2
Something
4
Shows one approach.
IHTH
I would like to run a Bash shell script (.sh) using the Windows Subsystem for Linux as part of a Build Event in Visual Studio, in a C++ project.
But there are lots of errors when I do this, and I can't seem to find the right combination of quotation marks and apostrophes and backslashes to either make Bash run in the first place, or to properly pass the path to the script.
How do I make Visual Studio run my Bash shell script as a build event?
(Feel free to skip to the bottom of this answer if you don't care about how to solve the problem and just want a command you can copy and paste!)
Overview
I run a number of Bash shell scripts as part of Build events in Visual Studio, and I used to use Cygwin to run them. Now that the Windows Subsystem for Linux is available, I spent some time switching my builds over to use WSL, and it wasn't as easy as I'd hoped, but it can work, with a little time and energy.
There are several issues you'll run into if you're going to do this:
The path to bash.exe may not be what you think it is, because under the hood, Visual Studio uses a 32-bit build process, so if you're on a 64-bit machine, you can't simply run the 64-bit bash.exe without getting the dreaded 'C:\Windows\System32\bash.exe' is not recognized error.
The path to your solution or project is a Windows path that uses backslashes (\), and those don't play nice in Unix, which prefers forward slashes (/) as a path delimiter.
The root drive of the solution, typically something like C:\, is meaningless gibberish in Unix; to reach the root drive in WSL, you'll need to use a mounted drive under /mnt.
The casing of the drive letter is different between Windows and WSL: In Windows, it's uppercase C:\, and in WSL, it's lowercase /mnt/c.
And to make it a little harder, we don't want to hard-code any of the paths: It should all Just Work, no matter where the solution is found.
The good news is that they're all solvable issues! Let's tackle them one at a time.
Fixing the Issues
1. The proper path to Bash
Per the answer given here, you'll need to use a magic path to reach Bash when running it from a Visual Studio build. The correct path is not C:\Windows\System32\bash.exe, but is actually
%windir%\sysnative\bash.exe
The magic sysnative folder avoids the invisible filesystem redirection performed by the WOW64 layer, and points to the native bash.exe file.
2. Fixing the backslashes
The next problem you're likely to run into is the backslashes. Ideally, you'd like to run a project script like $(ProjectDir)myscript.sh, but that expands to something like C:\Code\MySolution\MyProject\myscript.sh. At a minimum, you'd like that to be at least C:/Code/MySolution/MyProject/myscript.sh, which isn't exactly right, but which is a lot closer to correct.
So sed to the rescue! sed is a Unix tool that mutates text in files: It searches for text using regular expressions, and, among other things, can replace that text with a modified version. Here, we're going to pipe the path we have into sed, and then use some regex magic to swap the path separators, like this (with lines wrapped here for readability):
%windir%\sysnative\bash.exe -c "echo '$(ProjectDir)myscript.sh'
| sed -e 's/\\\\/\//g;'"
If you include this as your build event, you'll see that it now doesn't run the script, but it at least prints something like C:/Code/MySolution/MyProject/myscript.sh to the output console, which is a step in the right direction.
And yes, that's a lot of backslashes and quotes and apostrophes to get the escaping right, because Nmake.exe and bash and sed are all going to consume some of those special symbols while processing their respective command-lines.
3. Fixing the C:\ root path
We want to mutate the sed script so that it turns the C:\ into /mnt/C. A little more regex substitution magic can do that. (And we have to turn on the -r flag in sed so that we can easily use capture groups.)
%windir%\sysnative\bash.exe -c "echo '$(ProjectDir)myscript.sh'
| sed -re 's/\\\\/\//g; s/([A-Z]):/\/mnt\/\1/i;'"
If you run this, you'll now see the output path as something like /mnt/C/Code/MySolution/MyProject/myscript.sh, which is almost but not quite correct.
4. Fixing the case-change in the root path
WSL mounts your disks in lowercase, and Windows mounts them in uppercase. Consistency! How do we fix this? Yet more sed magic!
The \L command can be used to tell sed to transform succeeding characters to lowercase (and there's an equivalent \U for uppercase). The \E command will switch output back to "normal" mode, where characters are left untouched.
Adding these in finally results in the correct path being output:
%windir%\sysnative\bash.exe -c "echo '$(ProjectDir)myscript.sh'
| sed -re 's/\\\\/\//g; s/([A-Z]):/\/mnt\/\L\1\E/i;'"
5. Running it
This whole time, Bash has just been printing out the path to the script. How do we run it instead, now that it's the correct path?
The answer is to add `backticks`! Backticks cause Bash to execute the command contained within them, and to then use that command's output as the arguments to the next command. In this case, we're not going to output anything: We just want to run the output of sed as a command.
So including the backticks, here's the result:
%windir%\sysnative\bash.exe -c "`echo '$(ProjectDir)myscript.sh'
| sed -re 's/\\\\/\//g; s/([A-Z]):/\/mnt\/\L\1\E/i;'`"
The Complete Solution
Here's what the whole solution looks like, for running a script named myscript.sh as a Build Event, in the current Project directory of the current Solution:
%windir%\sysnative\bash.exe -c "`echo '$(ProjectDir)myscript.sh' | sed -re 's/\\\\/\//g; s/([A-Z]):/\/mnt\/\L\1\E/i;'`"
Here's a screen-shot showing the same thing in Visual Studio 2017, for a real C++ project:
It's not easy, but it's not impossible.
If you have Git for Windows installed, try this. I found it simpler than installing WSL. The basic idea is to create an intermediate batch script to call your bash script, using Git bash's in-built bash or sh command from the batch script.
With Git for Windows, you'll have a Git\bin folder e.g. at:
C:\Program Files\Git\bin
Inside that directory you should see the bash.exe and sh.exe programs. So if you add that directory to your Windows Path environment variable then you'll be able to use sh and bash from the Windows command line. These commands will allow you to run your bash scripts "inline" within a CMD console window. That is, they won't spawn a new bash window; meaning the console output will be visible in your VS build.
From there, just create a .bat file which calls your .sh file using either the sh command or the bash command. Not sure the difference; we just use the sh command. So if your bash script is pre.sh, then your batch file would be just a single line calling the bash script:
sh %~dp0\pre.sh
if errorlevel 1 (
exit /b %errorlevel%
)
The %~dp0 assumes the batch and bash scripts are in the same directory. You then point your VS build event to the .bat file. The check for error level is necessary so that any failures from the bash script are forwarded up to the batch script. See: How do I get the application exit code from a Windows command line?.
To hook this in as a build event in VS2019 then, just follow the standard instructions for hooking in a .bat file: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/specifying-custom-build-events-in-visual-studio?view=vs-2019.
Update: Beware Visual Studio's (VS's) Path Variable Behaviour
One thing we found quite frustrating with this solution was the tendency of VS to not load in the path variable correctly. It seems to prefer the user variable over the system variable. But even after we deleted the user variable, sometimes the path didn't seem to be getting picked up by VS, and we kept getting "sh is not recognised..." messages on our build console. Whenever that happened, restarting VS seemed to do the trick. Not very satisfying, but it gets us by.
Update: This is not a Full Unix Solution
Git for Windows does have a lot of Unix commands available, but not all of them. So in general, this won't work. For the general case, WSL is more robust. However, if it's just pretty lightweight Unix you need, this will suffice, and will likely be an easier approach for Windows users who would rather avoid the steeper setup cost of installing the full WSL.
Original idea to use Git bash came from here: https://superuser.com/questions/1218943/windows-command-prompt-capture-output-of-bash-script-in-one-step
Instead of backticks, you can wrap command with $( and )
The general idea is pretty simple, I want to make a script for a certain task, I do it in the shell (any shell), and then I want to copy the commands I have used.
If I copy all the stuff in the window, then I have a lot of stuff to delete and to correct. (and is not easy to copy from shell)
Resume: I want to take all the things I wrote...
Is there an easy way to do this easy task?
Update: Partial solution
In bash, the solution is pretty simple, there is a history command, and there are ports of the idea:
IRB: Tweaking IRB
Cmd: Use PowerShell -> Get-History (or use cygwin)
Another Update:
I found that doskey have a parameter history to do this:
cmd: Doskey /history >> history.cmd
Yes, you can use:
history -w filename.sh
This will save your command history to filename.sh. You may need to edit that to keep just the lines at the end that are part of your command sequence.
NOTE: This is a bash command and will not work with all shells.
script may help here. Typing script will throw you into a new shell and save
all input and output to a file called typescript. When you're done with your interaction,
exit the shell. The file typescript is then amenable to grep'ing. For example, you might
grep for your prompt and save the output to the file. If you're a clumsy typist like me, then you may need to do some cleanup work to remove backspaces. There used to be a program that did thisbut I don't seem to find it right now. Here is one I found on the
'net: http://www.cat.pdx.edu/tutors/files/fixts.cpp
This approach is especially useful if you want to track and post on the web an entire interactive session.
I am trying to use doxygen to generate documentation for some matlab classes I have written. I am using the doxygen-matlab package, which includes a perl script to kludge matlab .m files into c++ style commented files, so that doxygen can read them.
In my doxyfile, I have set (according to the instructions)
FILTER_PATTERNS = *m=C:/doxygenMatlab/m2cpp.pl
However, when the code runs, rather than running the script on the input files, it appears to just open the script using whatever the default windows setting for .pl is.
IE, if I associate .pl with notepad, the script is opened by notepad once for each input file doxygen is trying to parse. If I associate .pl with perl.exe, the script runs and throws the no argument error
Argument must contain filename -1 at C:\doxygenMatlab\m2cpp.pl line 4.
The doxygen documentation says
Doxygen will invoke the filter program by executing (via popen()) the command <filter> <input-file>
So I am wondering if there is some problem with popen() and windows that I could fix.
Could you try the workarounds I posted on the Matlab File Exchange regarding the doxygen package ?
Set the following variables in the Doxyfile :
INPUT_FILTER=perl m2cpp.pl
FILE_PATTERNS=*.m
If it doesn't work you should try to install ActivePerl : with this version of perl, everything is working fine.
I tried to reproduce the error using the Windows command prompt ("cmd") and noticed the following:
If you call "perl m2cpp.pl" you get error -1 because you did not specify a m-file to be translated into a cpp-file.
If you call "perl m2cpp.pl mfile" and the path of mfile contains spaces, you get error 1.
After I moved the mfile into a location which does not contain spaces, I got the desired output.
Now back to Doxygen. I tried what you suggested, Fabrice, without any luck. I read the doxygen help and found out that the INPUT_FILTER variable is only read and used if FILTER_PATTERNS is empty.
Therefore, I now use INPUT_FILTER = "C:\Programme\MATLAB\R2009a\sys\perl\win32\bin\perl U:\doxygen_matlab\m2cpp.pl" and an empty FILTER_PATTERNS variable. With this configuration, you can even leave the PERL_PATH variable empty. Moreover, there seems to be no issues with file names that contain spaces.
Unfortunately, all files are parsed with the above configuration, not only m-files. However, setting FILTER_PATTERNS to something like *.m=C:\Programme\MATLAB\R2009a\sys\perl\win32\bin\perl U:\doxygen_matlab\m2cpp.pl does not work because doxygen automatically adds the name of the filtered mfile and interprets the command as perl "m2cpp.pl mfile". Of course, the file "m2cpp.pl mfile" does not exist, because these are two files.
Maybe you can find a solution to this problem. In the meantime, I suggest the workaround above and that you keep your C-files away from the folder that contains the m-files.
write a simple batch file, e.g. mfilter.bat, which takes one argument from command line:
C:\Programme\MATLAB\R2009a\sys\perl\win32\bin\perl U:\doxygen_matlab\m2cpp.pl %1
Change setting in Doxyfile:
FILTER_PATTERNS = *.m=mfile.bat
This did it for me (on a Windows platform)
I think I solved this problem : it came from a bad association between .pl and the program to execute (maybe due to a bad installation of the perl shipped whith Matlab ?).
To correct this, you should change the association for the .pl files : in a Windows command prompt ("cmd"), just type de 2 following lines :
assoc .pl=PerlScript
ftype PerlScript=C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R20xx\sys\perl\win32\bin\perl.exe %1 %*
(the old installation forgot the %* at the end, the arguments were not passed to the m2cpp.pl script).
And then everything should be fine with the FILTER_PATTERNS set the usual way, for example FILTER_PATTERN=*m=C:\DoxygenMatlbab\m2cpp.pl
Could you tell me if this fixed your problem ?
According to the Doxygen forums, there is a difference in behavior between using INPUT_FILTER and FILTER_PATTERNS.
I found that if I do some extra (escaped) quoting, I can get FILTER_PATTERNS to work. For example, instead of:
FILTER_PATTERNS = "*.m=sed -e 's|%%|//!|'"
Try:
FILTER_PATTERNS = "*.m=\"sed -e 's|%%|//!|'\""
(All of my experimentation was done with doxygen version 1.8.6)
I want to create .bat application that read into text file, find / and remove it.
FROM PPD/HQ
ALLEN/BRAD/MR
change to:-
FROM PPD HQ
ALLEN BRAD MR
Eliminate the / and save in other text file will be just fine.
I'm a newbie and help me to enter DOS world.
Thnx!
Does this really have to be pure MS-DOS? As in, no Windows, no extra tools? If you mean a "DOS Box" -- really, a Windows console -- and are able to install a little software to help you, this one-liner will do it:
$ tr / ' ' < original-file.txt > new-file.txt
That's Bash shell syntax calling the POSIX tr program, rather than an MS-DOS style batch program. The Unixy command line offered by Cygwin is vastly more powerful than the legacy MS-DOS stuff, even with the minor enhancements Microsoft has added over the years.
Plus, it's a gateway into the Linux/BSD/OS X/Unix world, another fun place to play.