Oddities in fail2ban regex - fail2ban

This appears to be a bug in fail2ban, with different behaviour between the fail2ban-regex tool and a failregex filter
I am attempting to develop a new regex rule for fail2ban, to match:
\"%20and%20\"x\"%3D\"x
When using fail2ban-regex, this appears to produce the desired result:
^<HOST>.*GET.*\\"%20and%20\\"x\\"%3D\\"x.* 200.*$
As does this:
^<HOST>.*GET.*\\\"%20and%20\\\"x\\\"%3D\\\"x.* 200.*$
However, when I put either of these into a filter, I get the following error:
Failed during configuration: '%' must be followed by '%' or '(', found:…
To have this work in a filter you have to double-up the ‘%’, ie ‘%%’:
^<HOST>.*GET.*\\\"%%20and%%20\\\"x\\\"%%3D\\\"x.* 200.*$
While this gets the required hits running as a filter, it gets none running through fail2ban-regex.
I tried the \\\\ as Andre suggested below, but this gets no results in fail2ban-regex.
So, as this appears to be differential behaviour, I am going to file it as a bug.

According to Python's own site a singe backslash "\" has to be written as "\\\\" and there's no mention of %.
Regular expressions use the backslash character ('') to indicate
special forms or to allow special characters to be used without
invoking their special meaning. This collides with Python’s usage of
the same character for the same purpose in string literals; for
example, to match a literal backslash, one might have to write '\\'
as the pattern string, because the regular expression must be \, and
each backslash must be expressed as \ inside a regular Python string
literal
I would just go with:
failregex = (?i)^<HOST> -.*"(GET|POST|HEAD|PUT).*20and.*3d.*$
the .* wil match anything inbetween anyways and (?i) makes the entire regex case-insensitive

Related

Alphanumeric substitution with vim

I'm using the vscode vimplugin. I have a bunch of lines that look like:
Terry,169,80,,,47,,,22,,,6,,
I want to remove all the alphanumeric characters after the first comma so I get:
Terry,,,,,,,,,,,,,
In command mode I tried:
s/^.+\,[a-zA-Z0-9-]\+//g
But this does not appear to do anything. How can I get this working?
edit:
s/^[^,]\+,[a-zA-Z0-9-]\+//g
\+ is greedy; ^.\+, eats the entire line up to the last ,.
Instead of the dot (which means "any character") use [^,] which means "any but a comma". Then ^[^,]\+, means "any characters up to the first comma".
The problem with your requirement is that you want to anchor at the beginning using ^ so you cannot use flag g — with the anchor any substitution will be done once. The only way I can solve the puzzle is to use expressions: match and preserve the anchored text and then use function substitute() with flag g.
I managed with the following expression:
:s/\(^[^,]\+\)\(,\+\)\(.\+\)$/\=submatch(1) . submatch(2) . substitute(submatch(3), '[^,]', '', 'g')/
Let me split it in parts. Searching:
\(^[^,]\+\) — first, match any non-commas
\(,\+\) — any number of commas
\(.\+\)$ — all chars to the end of the string
Substituting:
\= — the substitution is an expression
See http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/change.html#sub-replace-expression
submatch(1) — replace with the first match (non-commas anchored with ^)
submatch(2) — replace with the second match (commas)
substitute(submatch(3), '[^,]', '', 'g') — replace in the rest of the string
The last call to substitute() is simple, it replaces all non-commas with empty strings.
PS. Tested in real vim, not vscode.

Not able to understand a command in perl

I need help to understand what below command is doing exactly
$abc{hier} =~ s#/tools.*/dfII/?.*##g;
and $abc{hier} contains a path "/home/test1/test2/test3"
Can someone please let me know what the above command is doing exactly. Thanks
s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/ is Perl's substitution operator. It searches a string for text that matches the regex PATTERN and replaces it with REPLACEMENT.
By default, the substitution operator works on $_. To tell it to work on a different variable, you use the binding operator - =~.
The default delimiter used by the substitution operator is a slash (/) but you can change that to any other character. This is useful if your PATTERN or your REPLACEMENT contains a slash. In this case, the programmer has used # as the delimiter.
To recap:
$abc{hier} =~ s#PATTERN#REPLACEMENT#;
means "look for text in $abc{hier} that matches PATTERN and replace it with REPLACEMENT.
The substitution operator also has various options that change its behaviour. They are added by putting letters after the final delimiter. In this case we have a g. That means "make the substitution global" - or match and change all occurrences of PATTERN.
In your case, the REPLACEMENT string is empty (we have two # characters next to each other). So we're replacing the PATTERN with nothing - effectively deleting whatever matches PATTERN.
So now we have:
$abc{hier} =~ s#PATTERN*##g;
And we know it means, "in the variable $abc{hier}, look for any string that matches PATTERN and replace it with nothing".
The last thing to look at is the PATTERN (or regular expression - "regex"). You can get the full definition of regexes in perldoc perlre. But to explain what we're using here:
/tools : is the fixed string "/tools"
.* : is zero or more of any character
/dfII : is the fixed string "/dfII"
/? : is an optional slash character
.* : is (again) zero or more of any character
So, basically, we're removing bits of a file path from a value that's stored in a hash.
This =~ means "Do a regex operation on that variable."
(Actually, as ikegami correctly reminds me, it is not necessarily only regex operations, because it could also be a transliteration.)
The operation in question is s#something#else#, which means replace the "something" with something "else".
The g at the end means "Do it for all occurences of something."
Since the "else" is empty, the replacement has the effect of deleting.
The "something" is a definition according to regex syntax, roughly it means "Starting with '/tools' and later containing '/dfII', followed pretty much by anything until the end."
Note, the regex mentions at the end /?.*. In detail, this would mean "A slash (/) , or maybe not (?), and then absolutely anything (.) any number of times including 0 times (*). Strictly speaking it is not necessary to define "slash or not", if it is followed by "anything any often", because "anything" includes as slash, and anyoften would include 0 or one time; whether it is followed by more "anything" or not. I.e. the /? could be omitted, without changing the behaviour.
(Thanks ikeagami for confirming.)
$abc{hier} =~ s#/tools.*/dfII/?.*##g;
The above commands use regular expression to strip/remove trailing /tools.*/dfII and
/tools.*/dfII/.* from value of hier member of %abc hash.
It is pretty basic perl except non standard regular expression limiters (# instead of standard /). It allows to avoid escaping / inside the regular expression (s/\/tools.*\/dfII\/?.*//g).
My personal preferred style-guide would make it s{/tools.*/dfII/?.*}{}g .

Extracting substring from inside bracketed string, where the substring may have spaces

I've got an application that has no useful api implemented, and the only way to get certain information is to parse string output. This is proving to be very painful...
I'm trying to achieve this in bash on SLES12.
Given I have the following strings:
QMNAME(QMTKGW01) STATUS(Running)
QMNAME(QMTKGW01) STATUS(Ended normally)
I want to extract the STATUS value, ie "Ended normally" or "Running".
Note that the line structure can move around, so I can't count on the "STATUS" being the second field.
The closest I have managed to get so far is to extract a single word from inside STATUS like so
echo "QMNAME(QMTKGW01) STATUS(Running)" | sed "s/^.*STATUS(\(\S*\)).*/\1/"
This works for "Running" but not for "Ended normally"
I've tried switching the \S* for [\S\s]* in both "grep -o" and "sed" but it seems to corrupt the entire regex.
This is purely a regex issue, by doing \S you requested to match non-white space characters within (..) but the failing case has a space between which does not comply with the grammar defined. Make it simple by explicitly calling out the characters to match inside (..) as [a-zA-Z ]* i.e. zero or more upper & lower case characters and spaces.
sed 's/^.*STATUS(\([a-zA-Z ]*\)).*/\1/'
Or use character classes [:alnum:] if you want numbers too
sed 's/^.*STATUS(\([[:alnum:] ]*\)).*/\1/'
sed 's/.*STATUS(\([^)]*\)).*/\1/' file
Output:
Running
Ended normally
Extracting a substring matching a given pattern is a job for grep, not sed. We should use sed when we must edit the input string. (A lot of people use sed and even awk just to extract substrings, but that's wasteful in my opinion.)
So, here is a grep solution. We need to make some assumptions (in any solution) about your input - some are easy to relax, others are not. In your example the word STATUS is always capitalized, and it is immediately followed by the opening parenthesis (no space, no colon etc.). These assumptions can be relaxed easily. More importantly, and not easy to work around: there are no nested parentheses. You will want the longest substring of non-closing-parenthesis characters following the opening parenthesis, no mater what they are.
With these assumptions:
$ grep -oP '\bSTATUS\(\K[^)]*(?=\))' << EOF
> QMNAME(QMTKGW01) STATUS(Running)
> QMNAME(QMTKGW01) STATUS(Ended normally)
> EOF
Running
Ended normally
Explanation:
Command options: o to return only the matched substring; P to use Perl extensions (the \K marker and the lookahead). The regexp: we look for a word boundary (\b) - so the word STATUS is a complete word, not part of a longer word like SUBSTATUS; then the word STATUS and opening parenthesis. This is required for a match, but \K instructs that this part of the matched string will not be returned in the output. Then we seek zero or more non-closing-parenthesis characters ([^)]*) and we require that this be followed by a closing parenthesis - but the closing parenthesis is also not included in the returned string. That's a "lookahead" (the (?= ... ) construct).

Powershell - Replacing substrings with wildcards

I am writing a function in powershell, and part of it needs to replace occurrences of substrings with a wildcard. Strings will look something like this:
"something-#{reference}-somethingElse-#{anotherReference}-01"
I want it to end up looking like this:
"something-*-somethingElse-*-01"
The problem I have here is that I don't know what "#{something}" will be, just that there will be multiple substrings enclosed inside a hashtag followed by curly braces. I've tried the Replace method like so:
$newString = $originalString.Replace('#{*}', '*')
I was hoping that would replace everything from the hashtag to the ending curly brace, but it doesn't work like that. I'm trying to avoid cumbersome code that is based on finding the indices of '#' and '}' and then replacing, and hoping there is a simpler and more elegant solution.
Your replace has at least one problem, possibly two;
the method $string.Replace() is from the .Net framework string class - it's PowerShell, but it's exactly what you'd get in C#, minimal PowerShell script-y convenience added on top - and it's for literal text replacements - it doesn't support wildcards or regular expressions.
The 'wildcard' support in PowerShell is quite limited, to the -like operator only, as far as I know. That can't do text replacing, and it's a convenience for people who don't know regular expression; behind the scenes it converts to a regular expression anyway. So the dream of a a*b replace won't work either.
As #PetSerAl comments, regular expressions and the PowerShell -replace operator are the PowerShell way to do every string pattern replace quickly and without .indexOf().
Their pattern #{[^}]*} expands to:
#{} on the outside, as literal characters
[^}] as a character class saying "not a } character, but anything else"
[*}]* - as many not }'s as there are.
So, match hash and open brace, everything that isn't the closing brace brace (to avoid overrunning past the closing brace), then the closing brace. Replace it all with literal *.
Implicitly, do that search/replace as many times as possible in the input string.

Why does my LIKE statement fail with '\\_' for matching?

I have a database entry that has entries that look like this:
id | name | code_set_id
I have this particular entry that I need to find:
674272310 | raphodo/qrc_resources.py | 782732
In my rails app (2.3.8), I have a statement that evaluates to this:
SELECT * from fyles WHERE code_set_id = 782732 AND name LIKE 'raphodo/qrc\\_resources.py%';
From reading up on escaping, the above query is correct. This is supposed to correctly double escape the underscore. However this query does not find the record in the database. These queries will:
SELECT * from fyles WHERE code_set_id = 782732 AND name LIKE 'raphodo/qrc\_resources.py%';
SELECT * from fyles WHERE code_set_id = 782732 AND name LIKE 'raphodo/qrc_resources.py%';
Am I missing something here? Why is the first SQL statement not finding the correct entry?
A single backslash in the RHS of a LIKE escapes the following character:
9.7.1. LIKE
[...]
To match a literal underscore or percent sign without matching other characters, the respective character in pattern must be preceded by the escape character. The default escape character is the backslash but a different one can be selected by using the ESCAPE clause. To match the escape character itself, write two escape characters.
So this is a literal underscore in a LIKE pattern:
\_
and this is a single backslash followed by an "any character" pattern:
\\_
You want LIKE to see this:
raphodo/qrc\_resources.py%
PostgreSQL used to interpret C-stye backslash escapes in strings by default but no longer, now you have to use E'...' to use backslash escapes in string literals (unless you've changed the configuration options). The String Constants with C-style Escapes section of the manual covers this but the simple version is that these two:
name LIKE E'raphodo/qrc\\_resources.py%'
name LIKE 'raphodo/qrc\_resources.py%'
do the same thing as of PostgreSQL 9.1.
Presumably your Rails 2.3.8 app (or whatever is preparing your LIKE patterns) is assuming an older version of PostgreSQL than the one you're actually using. You'll need to adjust things to not double your backslashes (or prefix the pattern string literals with Es).