Executing grep via Perl - perl

I am new to Perl. I am trying to execute grep command with perl.
I have to read input from a file and based on the input, the grep has to be executed.
My code is as follows:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
#Reading input files line by line
open FILE, "input.txt" or die $!;
my $lineno = 1;
while (<FILE>) {
print " $_";
#This is what expected.
#our $result=`grep -r Unable Satheesh > out.txt`;
our $result=`grep -r $_ Satheesh > out.txt`;
print $result
}
print "************************************************************\n";
But, if I run the script, it looks like a infinite loop and script is keep on waiting and nothing is printed in the out.txt file.

The reason it's hanging is because you forgot to use chomp after reading from FILE. So there's a newline at the end of $_, and it's executing two shell commands:
grep -r $_
Satheesh > out.txt
Since there's no filename argument to grep, it's reading from standard input, i.e. the terminal. If you type Ctl-d when it hangs, you'll then get an error message telling you that there's no Satheesh command.
Also, since you're redirecting the output of grep to out.txt, nothing gets put in $result. If you want to capture the output in a variable and also put it into the file, you can use the tee command.
Here's the fix:
while (<FILE>) {
print " $_";
chomp;
#This is what expected.
#our $result=`grep -r Unable Satheesh > out.txt`;
our $result=`grep -r $_ Satheesh | tee out.txt`;
print $result
}

Related

Using command line to remove lines from text file

I have a text file and need to remove all lines that DO NOT contain http in them. Alternatively, it could just output all the files that DO contain http in them to the new file.
The name of my original file is list.txt and I need to generate a new file with a name like new.txt
I know that there are several ways to do this via command line, but what I'm really looking for is the quickest way since I need to do this with several files and each of them are a few gigs in size...
The quickest, shortest solution,
fgrep -v "http"
Of course, grep, egrep, awk, perl, etc make this more fungible.
Here is a short shell script. Edit "delhttp.sh" containing,
#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -eq 0 ] ; then
fgrep -v "http"
elif [ $# -eq 1 ] ; then
f1=${1:-"null"}
if [ ! -f $f1 ]; then echo "file $f1 dne"; exit 1; fi
fgrep -v "http" $f1 #> $f2
elif [ $# -eq 2 ]; then
f1=${1:-"null"}
if [ ! -f $f1 ]; then echo "file $f1 dne"; exit 1; fi
f2=${2:-"null"}
fgrep -v "http" $f1 > $f2
fi
Then make this file executable using,
chmod +x delhttp.sh
Here is a perl script (if you prefer), Edit "delhttp.pl" containing,
#!/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $f1=$ARGV[0]||"-";
my $f2=$ARGV[1]||"-";
my ($fh, $ofh);
open($fh,"<$f1") or die "file $f1 failed";
open($ofh,">$f2") or die "file $f2 failed";
while(<$fh>) { if( !($_ =~ /http/) ) { print $ofh "$_"; } }
Again, make this file executable using,
chmod +x delhttp.pl
perl -i -lne 'print if(/http/)' your_file
This above command will delete all the lines from the file if they do not have http.
If you insist on keeping the original file backup, the you can anyhow give and option of ".bak" like mentioned below:
perl -i.bak -lne 'print if(/http/)' your_file
By this your_file.bak will be generated which is nothing but a copy of the original file and original file will be modified according to your need.
Also you can use awk:
awk '/http/' your_file
This will out put to the console. You can anyhow use '>' to store the output in a new file.
You could use grep. Using -v inverts the sense of matching, to select non-matching lines.
grep -v 'http' list.txt
Using Perl one-liner:
perl -ne '/^(?:(?!http).)*$/ and print' list.txt > new.txt

Running a background process in perl

I have a process which when
executed as below:
process_name > file.txt
will redirect all the output to file.txt and also to the console.
when executed like this
process_name >& file.txt&
will redirect the output to file.txt but will not print the output to console returning the pid on the console.
Now i want to execute the second way of running the process inside a perl script!
how could i do this?
currently i am usng the below method:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $res = `bsm_adjust_controller -F -ra -d 'subnetwork=NETSim_STD/bsc=0005' -f /tmp/31102012/Task_31102012_1421_0005.log >& /tmp/31102012/Ctrl_31102012_1421_0005.log&`;
print $res;
when i run the script it gives:
./temp.pl
sh: /tmp/31102012/Ctrl_31102012_1421_0005.log: bad number
I also tried the below method:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $res = "bsm_adjust_controller -F -ra -d 'subnetwork=NETSim_STD/bsc=0005' -f /tmp/31102012/Task_31102012_1421_0005.log >& /tmp/31102012/Ctrl_31102012_1421_0005.log&";
open(CMD, '-|', $res) || die "couldn't run $res: $!\n";
Even the above script throws the same error.
the purpose is to execute the process in background and continue with the next statements without caring what happened to the process and also i donot need the output of the process being run inside to console.
could anybody please help?
well this worked:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $cmd="bsm_adjust_controller -F -ra -d 'subnetwork=NETSim_STD/bsc=0106' -f /tmp/31102012/Task_31102012_1421_0005.log >/tmp/31102012/Ctrl_31102012_1421_0005.log";
open STDERR, ">/dev/null";
print "Redirected stderr to /dev/null\n";
my $pid=open (FH, "-|",$cmd);
if ($pid) { #parent
print "/tmp/31102012/Task_31102012_1421_0005.log";
exit;
}
print "Redirected stderr to /dev/null\n";
close(FH);

Perl - One liner file edit: "perl -n -i.bak -e "print unless /^$id$,/" $filetoopena;" Not working

I cannot get this to work.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser warningsToBrowser);
my $id='123456';
my $filetoopen = '/home/user/public/somefile.txt';
file contains:
123456
234564
364899
437373
So...
A bunch of other subs and code
if(-s $filetoopen){
perl -n -i.bak -e "print unless /^$id$,/" $filetoopen;
}
I need to remove the line that matches $id from file $filetoopen
But, I don't want script to "crash" if $id is not in $filetoopen either.
This is in a .pl scripts sub, not being run from command line.
I think I am close but, after reading for hours here, I had to resort to posting the question.
Will this even work in a script?
I tried TIE with success but, I need to know alternatively how to do this without TIE::FILE.
When I tried I got the error:
syntax error at mylearningcurve.pl line 456, near "bak -e "
Thanks for teaching this old dog...
First of all (this is not the cause of your problem) $, (aka $OUTPUT_FIELD_SEPARATOR) defaults to undef, I'm not sure why you are using it in the regex. I have a feeling the comma was a typo.
It's unclear if you are calling this from a shell script or from Perl?
If from Perl, you should not call a nested Perl interpreter at all.
If the file is small, slurp it in and print:
use File::Slurp;
my #lines = read_file($filename);
write_file($filename, grep { ! /^$id$/ } #lines);
If the file is large, read line by line as a filter.
use File::Copy;
move($filename, "$filename.old") or die "Can not rename: $!\n";
open(my $fh_old, "<", "$filename.old") or die "Can not open $filename.old: $!\n";
open(my $fh, ">", $filename) or die "Can not open $filename: $!\n";
while my $line (<$fh_old>) {
next if $line =~ /^id$/;
print $fh $_;
}
close($fh_old);
close($fh);
If from a shell script, this worked for me:
$ cat x1
123456
234564
364899
437373
$ perl -n -i.bak -e "print unless /^$id$/" x1
$ cat x1
234564
364899
437373
if(-s $filetoopen){
perl -n -i.bak -e "print unless /^$id$,/" $filetoopen;
}
I'm not at all sure what you expect this to do. You can't just put a command line program in the middle of Perl code. You need to use system to call an external program. And Perl is just an external program like any other.
if(-s $filetoopen){
system('perl', '-n -i.bak -e "print unless /^$id$,/"', $filetoopen);
}
The functionality of the -i command line argument can be accessed via $^I.
local #ARGV = $filetoopen;
local $^I = '.bak';
local $_;
while (<>) {
print if !/^$id$/;
}

Dynamic Perl find and replace using grep inside backticks

I am trying to do a dynamic search and replace with Perl on the command line with part of the replacement text being the output of a grep command within backticks. Is this possible to do on the command line, or will I need to write a script to do this?
Here is the command that I thought would do the trick. I thought that Perl would treat the backticks as a command substitution, but instead it just treats the backticks and the content within them as a string:
perl -p -i -e 's/example.xml/http:\/\/exampleURL.net\/`grep -ril "example_needle" *`\/example\/path/g' `grep -ril "example_needle" *`
UPDATE:
Thanks for the helpful answers. Yes, there was a typo in my original one-liner: the target file of grep is supposed to be *.
I wrote a small script based on Schewrn's example, but am having confusing results. Here is the script I wrote:
#!/usr/bin/env perl -p -i
my $URL_First = "http://examplesite.net/some/path/";
my $URL_Last = "/example/example.xml";
my #files = `grep -ril $URL_Last .`;
chomp #files;
foreach my $val (#files) {
#dir_names = split('/',$val);
if(#dir_names[1] ne $0) {
my $url = $URL_First . #dir_names[1] . $URL_Last;
open INPUT, "+<$val" or die $!;
seek INPUT,0,0;
while(<INPUT>) {
$_ =~ s{\Q$URL_Last}{$url}g;
print INPUT $_;
}
close INPUT;
}
}
Basically what I am trying to do is:
Find files that contain $URL_Last.
Replace $URL_Last with $URL_First plus the name of the directory that the matched file is in, plus $URL_Last.
Write the above change to the input file without modifying anything else in the input file.
After running my script, it completely garbled the HTML code in the input file and it cut off the first few characters of each line in the file. This is strange, because I know for sure that $URL_Last only occurs once in each file, so it should only be matched once and replaced once. Is this being caused by a misuse of the seek function?
You should use another delimiter for s/// so that you don't need to escape slashes in the URL:
perl -p -i -e '
s#example.xml#http://exampleURL.net/`grep -ril "example_needle"`/example/path#g'
`grep -ril "example_needle" *`
Your grep command inside the regex will not be executed, as it is just a string, and backticks are not meta characters. Text inside a substitution will act as though it was inside a double quoted string. You'd need the /e flag to execute the shell command:
perl -p -i -e '
s#example.xml#
qq(http://exampleURL.net/) . `grep -ril "example_needle"` . qq(/example/path)
#ge'
`grep -ril "example_needle" *`
However, what exactly are you expecting that grep command to do? It lacks a target file. -l will print file names for matching files, and grep without a target file will use stdin, which I suspect will not work.
If it is a typo, and you meant to use the same grep as for your argument list, why not use #ARGV?
perl -p -i -e '
s#example.xml#http://exampleURL.net/#ARGV/example/path#g'
`grep -ril "example_needle" *`
This may or may not do what you expect, depending on whether you expect to have newlines in the string. I am not sure that argument list will be considered a list or a string.
It seems like what you're trying to do is...
Find a file in a tree which contains a given string.
Use that file to build a URL.
Replace something in a string with that URL.
You have three parts, and you could jam them together into one regex, but it's much easier to do it in three steps. You won't hate yourself in a week when you need to add to it.
The first step is to get the filenames.
# grep -r needs a directory to search, even if it's just the current one
my #files = `grep -ril $search .`;
# strip the newlines off the filenames
chomp #files;
Then you need to decide what to do if you get more than one file from grep. I'll leave that choice up to you, I'm just going to take the first one.
my $file = $files[0];
Then build the URL. Easy enough...
# Put it in a variable so it can be configured
my $Site_URL = "http://www.example.com/";
my $url = $Site_URL . $file;
To do anything more complicated, you'd use URI.
Now the search and replace is trivial.
# The \Q means meta-characters like . are ignored. Better than
# remembering to escape them all.
$whatever =~ s{\Qexample.xml}{$url}g;
You want to edit files using -p and -i. Fortunately we can emulate that functionality.
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings; # never do without these
my $Site_URL = "http://www.example.com/";
my $Search = "example-search";
my $To_Replace = "example.xml";
# Set $^I to edit files. With no argument, just show the output
# script.pl .bak # saves backup with ".bak" extension
$^I = shift;
my #files = `grep -ril $Search .`;
chomp #files;
my $file = $files[0];
my $url = $Site_URL . $file;
#ARGV = ($files[0]); # set the file up for editing
while (<>) {
s{\Q$To_Replace}{$url}g;
}
Everyone's answers were very helpful to my writing a script that wound up working for me. I actually found a bash script solution yesterday, but wanted to post a Perl answer in case anyone else finds this question through Google.
The script that #TLP posted at http://codepad.org/BFpIwVtz is an alternative way of doing this.
Here is what I ended up writing:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Tie::File;
my $URL_First = 'http://example.com/foo/bar/';
my $Search = 'path/example.xml';
my $URL_Last = '/path/example.xml';
# This grep returns a list of files containing "path/example.xml"
my #files = `grep -ril $Search .`;
chomp #files;
foreach my $File_To_Edit (#files) {
# The output of $File_To_Edit looks like this: "./some_path/index.html"
# I only need the "some_path" part, so I'm going to split up the output and only use #output[1] ("some_path")
#output = split('/',$File_To_Edit);
# "some_path" is the parent directory of "index.html", so I'll call this "$Parent_Dir"
my $Parent_Dir = #output[1];
# Make sure that we don't edit the contents of this script by checking that $Parent_Dir doesn't equal our script's file name.
if($Parent_Dir ne $0) {
# The $File_To_Edit is "./some_path/index.html"
tie #lines, 'Tie::File', $File_To_Edit or die "Can't read file: $!\n";
foreach(#lines) {
# Finally replace "path/example.xml" with "http://example.com/foo/bar/some_path/path/example.xml" in the $File_To_Edit
s{$Search}{$URL_First$Parent_Dir$URL_Last}g;
}
untie #lines;
}
}

How can I grep for a value from a shell variable?

I've been trying to grep an exact shell 'variable' using word boundaries,
grep "\<$variable\>" file.txt
but haven't managed to; I've tried everything else but haven't succeeded.
Actually I'm invoking grep from a Perl script:
$attrval=`/usr/bin/grep "\<$_[0]\>" $upgradetmpdir/fullConfiguration.txt`
$_[0] and $upgradetmpdir/fullConfiguration.txt contains some matching "text".
But $attrval is empty after the operation.
#OP, you should do that 'grepping' in Perl. don't call system commands unnecessarily unless there is no choice.
$mysearch="pattern";
while (<>){
chomp;
#s = split /\s+/;
foreach my $line (#s){
if ($line eq $mysearch){
print "found: $line\n";
}
}
}
I'm not seeing the problem here:
file.txt:
hello
hi
anotherline
Now,
mala#human ~ $ export GREPVAR="hi"
mala#human ~ $ echo $GREPVAR
hi
mala#human ~ $ grep "\<$GREPVAR\>" file.txt
hi
What exactly isn't working for you?
Not every grep supports the ex(1) / vi(1) word boundary syntax.
I think I would just do:
grep -w "$variable" ...
Using single quotes works for me in tcsh:
grep '<$variable>' file.txt
I am assuming your input file contains the literal string: <$variable>
If variable=foo are you trying to grep for "foo"? If so, it works for me. If you're trying to grep for the variable named "$variable", then change the quotes to single quotes.
On a recent linux it works as expected. Do could try egrep instead
Say you have
$ cat file.txt
This line has $variable
DO NOT PRINT ME! $variableNope
$variable also
Then with the following program
#! /usr/bin/perl -l
use warnings;
use strict;
system("grep", "-P", '\$variable\b', "file.txt") == 0
or warn "$0: grep exited " . ($? >> 8);
you'd get output of
This line has $variable
$variable also
It uses the -P switch to GNU grep that matches Perl regular expressions. The feature is still experimental, so proceed with care.
Also note the use of system LIST that bypasses shell quoting, allowing the program to specify arguments with Perl's quoting rules rather than the shell's.
You could use the -w (or --word-regexp) switch, as in
system("grep", "-w", '\$variable', "file.txt") == 0
or warn "$0: grep exited " . ($? >> 8);
to get the same result.
Using single quote it wont work. You should go for double quote
For example:
this wont work
--------------
for i in 1
do
grep '$i' file
done
this will work
--------------
for i in 1
do
grep "$i" file
done