I was trying out a program in Perl to remove duplicate entries. Say
File : abc
11
22
11
11
22
33
The output should be:
11
22
33
A Perl one-liner made my job easy. But I couldn't understand it. It's:
cat abc | perl -ne '$H{$_}++ or print'
With some basic knowledge, I presume that "output of abc is being passed line by line and they are pushing it into a hash... But what does -ne stand for? Why have they used ++? What's the or statement? What is the explanation?
Is there a way I could find the number of occurrences also?
11 - 3
22 - 2
33 - 1
You are correct so far. This pipes the file abc to the perl command, which is using a hash. To understand the -ne argument, compare it to this code which is pretty much equivalent,
while (<>){
$H{$_}++ or print $_
}
To be explicit, I also changed print to print $_.
Now the reason why this one-liner works is because when incrementing a key's value in the hash by doing $H{$_}++, we get a return value of the key's associated value.
The first time we encounter a key (line from abc), its value in the hash defaults to 0. As such, the or clause is not yet satisfied and it will continue on to print $_ (printing the line). But on any subsequent time we encounter a key, its return value will be >0 so the or clause will short circuit since any positive integer in Perl evaluates to true.
What is interesting to note is that this one-liner will not work if we instead write it like this:
cat abc | perl -ne '++$H{$_} or print'
That's because here we are pre-incrementing and the value will be returned after we increment it.
The command-line option -n loops around your -e code. If you type something like:
$ perl -n -e 'some code' file
Then Perl will interpret that as:
LINE:
while (<>) {
# your code goes here, each iteration reads
# from file and puts into $_ variable
}
file in your example is the pipe output from cat command.
$H{$_}++ or print $_;
This creates a hash with the lines of your file as keys. If the key doesn't exist, it asigns the 1 value, otherwise post-increments in. The first time ($H{$_}++) is evaluated as false, so Perl executes the or-right sentence. It's the same as:
print $_ unless $H{$_}++;
The Switches ne means:
-e = This command-line switch allows you to run code from the command line,
instead of having to write your program to a file and then execute it.
-n = This command-line switch allows you to run a program (usually specified with -e) against every line on standard input.
So this is how line by line output is processed.
Now, for the hash if the new value comes, since its not present is printed, but next time is incremented and the value is not printed due to the or condition.
In order to find the number of ocurences too, i am not sure to do with perl one liner, script will be very easy.
U can also do very simply using sort and uniq in linux:
cat abc |sort | uniq -c
Counting example:
cat abc | perl -nle'$H{$_}++ ; END { for (keys %H) { print "$_ - $H{$_}" } }'
Related
It works as intended:
perl -ne "print uc" /etc/passwd
But following isn't (it just prints in original case":
perl -pe uc /etc/passwd
I don't understand what's wrong with it.
thanks.
You're doing different things. So it's not surprising that you get different results.
In the first example, you take the value of $_, pass it to uc and print the results (which is an upper case version of the original text).
In the second example, you take the value of $_, pass it to uc and print the value in $_. But you've done nothing to update $_ so you get the unaltered value. The fix (as you've already noted in a comment) is to update $_ with the value that is returned by uc.
perl -pe '$_ = uc' /etc/passwd
This question is very much the same as this except that I am looking to do this as fast as possible, doing only a single pass of the (unfortunately gzip compressed) file.
Given the pattern CAPTURE and input
1:.........
...........
100:CAPTURE
...........
150:CAPTURE
...........
200:CAPTURE
...........
1000:......
Print:
100:CAPTURE
...........
150:CAPTURE
...........
200:CAPTURE
Can this be accomplished with a regular expression?
I vaguely remember that this kind of grammar cannot be captured by a regular expression but not quite sure as regular expressions these days provide look aheads,etc.
You can buffer the lines until you see a line that contains CAPTURE, treating the first occurrence of the pattern specially.
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use warnings;
use strict;
my $first=1;
my #buf;
while ( my $line = <> ) {
push #buf, $line unless $first;
if ( $line=~/CAPTURE/ ) {
if ($first) {
#buf = ($line);
$first = 0;
}
print #buf;
#buf = ();
}
}
Feed the input into this program via zcat file.gz | perl script.pl.
Which can of course be jammed into a one-liner, if need be...
zcat file.gz | perl -ne '$x&&push#b,$_;if(/CAPTURE/){$x||=#b=$_;print#b;#b=()}'
Can this be accomplished with a regular expression?
You mean in a single pass, in a single regex? If you don't mind reading the entire file into memory, sure... but this is obviously not a good idea for large files.
zcat file.gz | perl -0777ne '/((^.*CAPTURE.*$)(?s:.*)(?2)(?:\z|\n))/m and print $1'
I would write
gunzip -c file.gz | sed -n '/CAPTURE/,$p' | tac | sed -n '/CAPTURE/,$p' | tac
Find the first CAPTURE and look back for the last one.
echo "/CAPTURE/,?CAPTURE? p" | ed -s <(gunzip -c inputfile.gz)
EDIT: Answer to comment and second (better?) solution.
When your input doesn't end with a newline, ed will complain, as shown by these tests.
# With newline
printf "1,$ p\n" | ed -s <(printf "%s\n" test)
# Without newline
printf "1,$ p\n" | ed -s <(printf "%s" test)
# message removed
printf "1,$ p\n" | ed -s <(printf "%s" test) 2> /dev/null
I do not know the memory complications this will give for a large file, but you would prefer a streaming solution.
You can use sed for the next approach.
Keep reading lines until you find the first match. During this time only remember the last line read (by putting it in a Hold area).
Now change your tactics.
Append each line to the Hold area. You do not know when to flush until the next match.
When you have the next match, recall the Hold area and print this.
I needed some tweeking for preventing the second match to be printed twice. I solved this by reading the next line and replacing the HOLD area with that line.
The total solution is
gunzip -c inputfile.gz | sed -n '1,/CAPTURE/{h;n};H;/CAPTURE/{x;p;n;h};'
When you don't like the sed holding space, you can implemnt the same approach with awk:
gunzip -c inputfile.gz |
awk '/CAPTURE/{capt=1} capt==1{a[i++]=$0} /CAPTURE/{for(j=0;j<i;j++) print a[j]; i=0}'
I don't think regex will be faster than double scan...
Here is an awk solution (double scan)
$ awk '/pattern/ && NR==FNR {a[++f]=NR; next} a[1]<=FNR && FNR<=a[f]' file{,}
Alternatively if you have any a priori information on where the patterns appear on the file you can have heuristic approaches which will be faster on those special cases.
Here is one more example with regex (the cons is that if files are large, it will consume a large memory)
#!/usr/bin/perl
{
local $/ = undef;
open FILE, $ARGV[0] or die "Couldn't open file: $!";
binmode FILE;
$string = <FILE>;
close FILE;
}
print $1 if $string =~ /([^\n]+(CAPTURE).*\2.*?)\n/s;
Or with one liner:
cat file.tmp | perl -ne '$/=undef; print $1 if <STDIN> =~ /([^\n]+(CAPTURE).*\2.*?)\n/s'
result:
100:CAPTURE
...........
150:CAPTURE
...........
200:CAPTURE
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed '/CAPTURE/!d;:a;n;:b;//ba;$d;N;bb' file
Delete all lines until the first containing the required string. Print the line containing the required string. Replace the pattern space with the next line. If this line contains the required string, repeat the last two previous sentences. If it is the last line of the file, delete the pattern space. Otherwise, append the next line and repeat the last three previous sentences.
Having studied the test files used for haukex's benchmark, it would seem that sed is not the tool to extract this file. Using a mixture of csplit, grep and sed presents a reasonably fast solution as follows:
lines=$(grep -nTA1 --no-group-separator CAPTURE oldFile |
sed '1s/\t.*//;1h;$!d;s/\t.*//;H;x;s/\n/ /')
csplit -s oldFile $lines && rm xx0{0,2} && mv xx01 newFile
Split the original file into three files. A file preceding the first occurrence of CAPTURE, a file from the first CAPTURE to the last CAPTURE and a file containing of the remainder. The first and third files are discarded and the second file renamed.
csplit can use line numbers to split the original file. grep is extremely fast at filtering patterns and can return the line numbers of all patterns that match CAPTURE and the following context line. sed can manipulate the results of grep into two line numbers which are supplied to the csplit command.
When run against the test files (as above) I get timings around 10 seconds.
While posting this question, the problem I had at hand was that I had several huge gzip compressed log files generated by a java application.
The log lines were of the following format:
[Timestamp] (AppName) {EventId} [INFO]: Log text...
[Timestamp] (AppName) {EventId} [EXCEPTION]: Log text...
at com.application.class(Class.java:154)
caused by......
[Timestamp] (AppName) {EventId} [LogLevel]: Log text...
Given an EventId, I needed to extract all the lines corresponding to the event from these files. The problem became unsolvable with a trivial grep for EventId just due to the fact that the exception lines could be of arbitrary length and do not contain the EventId.
Unfortunately I forgot to consider the edge case where the last log line for an EventId could be the exception and the answers posted here would not print the stacktrace lines. However it wasn't hard to modify haukex's solution to cover these cases as well:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use warnings;
use strict;
my $first=1;
my #buf;
while ( my $line = <> ) {
push #buf, $line unless $first;
if ( $line=~/EventId/ or ($first==0 and $line!~/\(AppName\)/)) {
if ($first) {
#buf = ($line);
$first = 0;
}
print #buf;
#buf = ();
}
else {
$first = 1;
}
}
I am still wondering if the faster solutions(mainly walter's sed solution or haukex's in-memory perl solution) could be modified to do the same.
Assume a pipeline with three programs:
start | middle | end
If start and end are now part of one perl script, how can I pipe data through a shell command in the perl script, in order to pass through middle?
I tried the following (apologies for lack of strict mode, it was supposed to be a simple proof of concept):
#!/usr/bin/perl -n
# Output of "start" stage
$start = "a b c d\n";
# This shell command is "middle"
open (PR, "| sed -E 's/a/-/g' |") or die 'Failed to start sed';
# Pipe data from "start" into "middle"
print PR $start;
# Read data from "middle" into "end"
$end = "";
while (<PR>) {
$end .= $_;
}
close PR;
# Apply "end" and print output
$end =~ s/b/+/g;
print $end;
Expected output:
- + c d
Actual output:
none, until I hit ENTER, then I get - b c d. The middle command is receiving data from start and processing it, but the output is going to STDOUT instead of end. Also, the attempt to read from middle seems to be reading from STDIN instead (hence the relevance of hitting ENTER).
I'm aware that this could all easily be done in one line of perl (or sed); my problem is how to do piping in perl, not how to replace chars in a string.
You can use IPC::Open2 for this.
This code creates two file handles: $to_sed, which you can print to to send input to the program, and $from_sed which you can readline (or <$from_sed>) from to read the program's output.
use IPC::Open2;
my $pid = open2(my ($from_sed, $to_sed), "sed -E 's/a/-/g'");
Most often it is simplest to involve the shell, but there is an alternative call that allows you to bypass the shell and instead run a program and populate its argv directly. It is described in the linked documentation.
The reason your code does nothing until you hit enter is because you are using perl -n.
-n causes Perl to assume the following loop around your program, which makes it iterate over filename arguments
somewhat like sed -n or awk:
LINE:
while (<>) {
... # your program goes here
}
The part in your code where you read your file again returns nothing.
If you turn on warnings you will discover that perl doesn't do bi-directional pipes.
What's the use of <> in Perl. How to use it ?
If we simply write
<>;
and
while(<>)
what is that the program doing in both cases?
The answers above are all correct, but it might come across more plainly if you understand general UNIX command line usage. It is very common to want a command to work on multiple files. E.g.
ls -l *.c
The command line shell (bash et al) turns this into:
ls -l a.c b.c c.c ...
in other words, ls never see '*.c' unless the pattern doesn't match. Try this at a command prompt (not perl):
echo *
you'll notice that you do not get an *.
So, if the shell is handing you a bunch of file names, and you'd like to go through each one's data in turn, perl's <> operator gives you a nice way of doing that...it puts the next line of the next file (or stdin if no files are named) into $_ (the default scalar).
Here is a poor man's grep:
while(<>) {
print if m/pattern/;
}
Running this script:
./t.pl *
would print out all of the lines of all of the files that match the given pattern.
cat /etc/passwd | ./t.pl
would use cat to generate some lines of text that would then be checked for the pattern by the loop in perl.
So you see, while(<>) gets you a very standard UNIX command line behavior...process all of the files I give you, or process the thing I piped to you.
<>;
is a short way of writing
readline();
or if you add in the default argument,
readline(*ARGV);
readline is an operator that reads a line from the specified file handle. Reading from the special file handle ARGV will read from STDIN if #ARGV is empty or from the concatenation of the files named by #ARGV if it's not.
As for
while (<>)
It's a syntax error. If you had
while (<>) { ... }
it get rewritten to
while (defined($_ = <>)) { ... }
And as previously explained, that means the same as
while (defined($_ = readline(*ARGV))) { ... }
That means it will read lines from (previously explained) ARGV until there are no more lines to read.
It is called the diamond operator and feeds data from either stdin if ARGV is empty or each line from the files named in ARGV. This webpage http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/perl/learn/ch06_02.htm explains it very well.
In many cases of programming with syntactical sugar like this, Deparse of O is helpful to find out what's happening:
$ perl -MO=Deparse -e 'while(<>){print 42}'
while (defined($_ = <ARGV>)) {
print 42;
}
-e syntax OK
Quoting perldoc perlop:
The null filehandle <> is special: it can be used to emulate the
behavior of sed and awk, and any other Unix filter program that takes
a list of filenames, doing the same to each line of input from all of
them. Input from <> comes either from standard input, or from each
file listed on the command line.
it takes the STDIN standard input:
> cat temp.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $count=<>;
print "$count"."\n";
>
below is the execution:
> temp.pl
3
3
>
so as soon as you execute the script it will wait till the user gives some input.
after 3 is given as input,it stores that value in $count and it prints the value in the next statement.
I have a file, someFile, like this:
$cat someFile
hdisk1 active
hdisk2 active
I use this shell script to check:
$cat a.sh
#!/usr/bin/ksh
for d in 1 2
do
grep -q "hdisk$d" someFile && echo "$d : ok"
done
I am trying to convert it to Perl:
$cat b.sh
#!/usr/bin/ksh
export d
for d in 1 2
do
cat someFile | perl -lane 'BEGIN{$d=$ENV{'d'};} print "$d: OK" if /hdisk$d\s+/'
done
I export the variable d in the shell script and get the value using %ENV in Perl. Is there a better way of passing this value to the Perl one-liner?
You can enable rudimentary command line argument with the "s" switch. A variable gets defined for each argument starting with a dash. The -- tells where your command line arguments start.
for d in 1 2 ; do
cat someFile | perl -slane ' print "$someParameter: OK" if /hdisk$someParameter\s+/' -- -someParameter=$d;
done
See: perlrun
Sometimes breaking the Perl enclosure is a good trick for these one-liners:
for d in 1 2 ; do cat kk2 | perl -lne ' print "'"${d}"': OK" if /hdisk'"${d}"'\s+/';done
Pass it on the command line, and it will be available in #ARGV:
for d in 1 2
do
perl -lne 'BEGIN {$d=shift} print "$d: OK" if /hdisk$d\s+/' $d someFile
done
Note that the shift operator in this context removes the first element of #ARGV, which is $d in this case.
Combining some of the earlier suggestions and adding my own sugar to it, I'd do it this way:
perl -se '/hdisk([$d])/ && print "$1: ok\n" for <>' -- -d='[value]' [file]
[value] can be a number (i.e. 2), a range (i.e. 2-4), a list of different numbers (i.e. 2|3|4) (or almost anything else, that's a valid pattern) or even a bash variable containing one of those, example:
d='2-3'
perl -se '/hdisk([$d])/ && print "$1: ok\n" for <>' -- -d=$d someFile
and [file] is your filename (that is, someFile).
If you are having trouble writing a one-liner, maybe it is a bit hard for one line (just my opinion). I would agree with #FM's suggestion and do the whole thing in Perl. Read the whole file in and then test it:
use strict;
local $/ = '' ; # Read in the whole file
my $file = <> ;
for my $d ( 1 .. 2 )
{
print "$d: OK\n" if $file =~ /hdisk$d\s+/
}
You could do it looping, but that would be longer. Of course it somewhat depends on the size of the file.
Note that all the Perl examples so far will print a message for each match - can you be sure there are no duplicates?
My solution is a little different. I came to your question with a Google search the title of your question, but I'm trying to execute something different. Here it is in case it helps someone:
FYI, I was using tcsh on Solaris.
I had the following one-liner:
perl -e 'use POSIX qw(strftime); print strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time()-3600*24*2));'
which outputs the value:
2013-05-06
I was trying to place this into a shell script so I could create a file with a date in the filename, of X numbers of days in the past. I tried:
set dateVariable=`perl -e 'use POSIX qw(strftime); print strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time()-3600*24*$numberOfDaysPrior));'`
But this didn't work due to variable substitution. I had to mess around with the quoting, to get it to interpret it properly. I tried enclosing the whole lot in double quotes, but this made the Perl command not syntactically correct, as it messed with the double quotes around date format. I finished up with:
set dateVariable=`perl -e "use POSIX qw(strftime); print strftime('%Y-%m-%d', localtime(time()-3600*24*$numberOfDaysPrior));"`
Which worked great for me, without having to resort to any fancy variable exporting.
I realise this doesn't exactly answer your specific question, but it answered the title and might help someone else!
That looks good, but I'd use:
for d in $(seq 1 2); do perl -nle 'print "hdisk$ENV{d} OK" if $_ =~ /hdisk$ENV{d}/' someFile; done
It's already written on the top in one long paragraph but I am also writing for lazy developers who don't read those lines.
Double quotes and single quote has big different meaning for the bash.
So please take care
Doesn't WORK perl '$VAR' $FILEPATH
WORKS perl "$VAR" $FILEPATH