sed -e '/pattern/ {d;n}' - sed

sed -e '/pattern/ {d;n}'
sed -e '/pattern/ {d}'
Are these two commands the same on Linux?
Is it meaningful to put n at the end?
From "man sed", I got :
n N Read/append the next line of input into the pattern space.
Actually, I read this line (u-boot helper.mk):
sed -n -e '/.*\.u_boot_list[^ ]\+/ ! {d;n}' \
-e 's/.*\(\.u_boot_list[^ ]\+\).*$$$$/\1/' \
-e 's/\.[^\.]\+$$$$//' \
-e ':s /^.\+$$$$/ { p;s/^\(.*\)\.[^\.]*$$$$/\1/;b s }'

The two commands exist to serve two different (although seemingly similar) purposes. In your case, however, the "n" is redundant. Recall:
The "n" command will print out the current pattern space (unless the "-n" flag is used), empty the current pattern space, and read in the next line of input.
The "d" command deleted the current pattern space, reads in the next line, puts the new line into the pattern space, and aborts the current command, and starts execution at the first sed command. This is called starting a new "cycle."
This brief was taken from the grymoire site. You can read more about working with multiple lines here.

Related

sed comand is not replacing value after first match

I am trying to add a line in a file using sed after first match. I looked my threads online, addressing the same issue and tried below versions of the command:
sudo sed -e '/cfg_file/cfg_file='$NEW_FILE -e '/cfg_file/cfg_file=/q' MAIN_CONF_FILE
sudo sed -i '0,/cfg_file/ a\cfg_file='$NEW_FILE $MAIN_CONF_FILE
sudo sed -i '1s/cfg_file/cfg_file='$NEW_FILE $MAIN_CONF_FILE
sudo sed -i '1/cfg_file/s/cfg_file='$NEW_FILE $MAIN_CONF_FILE
Unfortunately, nothing worked for me. Either they show error, in case of point 3, or show similar behavior of adding lines after each match.
SAMPLE FILE
cfg_file=some_line1
cfg_file=some_line2
Now I want to add a line after first match of cg_file, like below.
EXPECTED RESULT
cfg_file=some_line1
cfg_file=my_added_line_after_first_match_only.
cfg_file=some_line2
Help me in adding line after first match and correcting my command.
Since you're on Ubuntu, you are using GNU sed. GNU sed has some weird features and some useful ones; you should ignore the weird ones and use the useful ones.
In context, the useful one is ranges starting at line 0. Weird ones are the way it messes with a, i and c commands.
MAIN_CONF_FILE=/tmp/copy.of.main.config.file
NEWFILE="my_added_line_after_first_match_only."
sed -e '0,/^cfg_file=/ { /^cfg_file/ a\' \
-e "cfg_file=$NEWFILE" \
-e '}' \
"$MAIN_CONF_FILE"
In classic sed, the a command is followed by backslash-newline, and each subsequent line of the script is appended up to and including the first line without a backslash at the end (and the backslash is removed). Each -e argument functions as a line in the script. Distinguish between the shell lines escaped with backslash at the end and the sed script lines with backslash at the end.
Example at work
$ cat /tmp/copy.of.main.config.file | so
cfg_file=some_line1
cfg_file=some_line2
$ cat script.sh
MAIN_CONF_FILE=/tmp/copy.of.main.config.file
NEWFILE="my_added_line_after_first_match_only."
SED=/opt/gnu/bin/sed
${SED} \
-e '0,/^cfg_file=/ { /^cfg_file/ a\' \
-e "cfg_file=$NEWFILE" \
-e '}' \
"$MAIN_CONF_FILE"
$ bash script.sh
cfg_file=some_line1
cfg_file=my_added_line_after_first_match_only.
cfg_file=some_line2
$
This is based on your attempt 2, but avoids some of the weird stuff.
Basic sanity
As I noted, it is not sensible to experiment with sudo and the -i option to sed. You don't use those until you know that the script will do the job correctly. It is dangerous to do anything as root via sudo. It is doubly dangerous when you don't know whether what you're trying to use will work. Don't risk wrecking your system.

Parsing a line with sed using regular expression

Using sed I want to parse Heroku's log-runtime-metrics like this one:
2016-01-29T00:38:43.662697+00:00 heroku[worker.2]: source=worker.2 dyno=heroku.17664470.d3f28df1-e15f-3452-1234-5fd0e244d46f sample#memory_total=54.01MB sample#memory_rss=54.01MB sample#memory_cache=0.00MB sample#memory_swap=0.00MB sample#memory_pgpgin=17492pages sample#memory_pgpgout=3666pages
the desired output is:
worker.2: 54.01MB (54.01MB is being memory_total)
I could not manage although I tried several alternatives including:
sed -E 's/.+source=(.+) .+memory_total=(.+) .+/\1: \2/g'
What is wrong with my command? How can it be corrected?
The .+ after source= and memory_total= are both greedy, so they accept as much of the line as possible. Use [^ ] to mean "anything except a space" so that it knows where to stop.
sed -E 's/.+source=([^ ]+) .+memory_total=([^ ]+) .+/\1: \2/g'
Putting your content into https://regex101.com/ makes it really obvious what's going on.
I'd go for the old-fashioned, reliable, non-extended sed expressions and make sure that the patterns are not too greedy:
sed -e 's/.*source=\([^ ]*\) .*memory_total=\([^ ]*\) .*/\1: \2/'
The -e is not the opposite of -E, which is primarily a Mac OS X (BSD) sed option; the normal option for GNU sed is -r instead. The -e simply means that the next argument is an expression in the script.
This produces your desired output from the given line of data:
worker.2: 54.01MB
Bonus question: There are some odd lines within the stream, I can usually filter them out using a grep pipe like | grep memory_total. However if I try to use it along with the sed command, it does not work. No output is produced with this:
heroku logs -t -s heroku | grep memory_total | sed.......
Sometimes grep | sed is necessary, but it is often redundant (unless you are using a grep feature that isn't readily supported by sed, such as Perl regular expressions).
You should be able to use:
sed -n -e '/memory_total=/ s/.*source=\([^ ]*\) .*memory_total=\([^ ]*\) .*/\1: \2/p'
The -n means "don't print by default". The /memory_total=/ matches the lines you're after; the s/// content is the same as before. I removed the g suffix that was there previously; the regex would never match multiple times anyway. I added the p to print the line when the substitution occurs.

Clarification of 'sed' usage

I just blindly followed a command from a tutorial to rename several folders at a time. Can anyone explain the meaning of "p;s" given as the argument to sed's -e option.
[root#LinuxD delsure]# ls
ar1 ar2 ar3 ar4 ar5 ar6 ar7
[root#LinuxD delsure]# find . -type d -name "ar*"|sed -e "p;s/ar/AR/g"|xargs -n2 mv
[root#LinuxD delsure]# ls
AR1 AR2 AR3 AR4 AR5 AR6 AR7
A sed script (the bit following the -e option) can contain multiple commands, separated by ;
The script in your example uses the p command to print the pattern space (i.e. the line just read from the input) followed by the s command to perform a substitution on the pattern space.
By default (unless the pattern space is cleared or the -n option is given to sed) after processing each line the current pattern spaceline is printed again, so the result of the substitution will be printed.
Another way to write the same thing would be:
sed -e "p" -e "s/ar/AR/g"
This separates the commands into two scripts. Another way would be:
sed "p;s/ar/AR/g"
because if the only argument to sed is a script then the -e option is not needed
The argument to the -e option is a script consisting of two commands. The first is p, which prints the unadulterated input, the second is a standard, global substitution. So for input ar1, this should output
ar1
AR1
The other part of this trick is the -n2 option on xargs, which forces it to only use two arguments at a time (instead of as many as it can handle, which would produce very different results).
One way in bash:
$ ls
ar6 ar7
$ find . -name 'ar*' | while IFS= read -r file; do echo mv "$file" "${file^^}"; done
mv ./ar6 ./AR6
mv ./ar7 ./AR7
get rid of the "echo" when you're happy with the output.

sed + remove "#" and empty lines with one sed command

how to remove comment lines (as # bal bla ) and empty lines (lines without charecters) from file with one sed command?
THX
lidia
If you're worried about starting two sed processes in a pipeline for performance reasons, you probably shouldn't be, it's still very efficient. But based on your comment that you want to do in-place editing, you can still do that with distinct commands (sed commands rather than invocations of sed itself).
You can either use multiple -e arguments or separate commands with a semicolon, something like (just one of these, not both):
sed -i 's/#.*$//' -e '/^$/d' fileName
sed -i 's/#.*$//;/^$/d' fileName
The following transcript shows this in action:
pax> printf 'Line # with a comment\n\n# Line with only a comment\n' >file
pax> cat file
Line # with a comment
# Line with only a comment
pax> cp file filex ; sed -i 's/#.*$//;/^$/d' filex ; cat filex
Line
pax> cp file filex ; sed -i -e 's/#.*$//' -e '/^$/d' filex ; cat filex
Line
Note how the file is modified in-place even with two -e options. You can see that both commands are executed on each line. The line with a comment first has the comment removed then all is removed because it's empty.
In addition, the original empty line is also removed.
#paxdiablo has a good answer but it can be improved.
(1) The '/^$/d' clause only matches 100% blank lines.
If you want to also match lines that are entirely whitespace (spaces, tabs etc.) use this instead:
'/^\s*$/d'
(2) The 's/#.*$//' clause only matches lines that start with the # character in column 0.
If you want to also match lines that have only whitespace before the first # use this instead:
'/^\s*#.*$/d'
The above criteria may not be universal (e.g. within a HEREDOC block, or in a Python multi-line string the different approaches could be significant), but in many cases the conventional definition of "blank" lines include whitespace-only, and "comment" lines include whitespace-then-#.
(3) Lastly, on OSX at least, the #paxdiablo solution in which the first clause turns comment lines into blank lines, and the second clause strips blank lines (including what were originally comments) doesn't work. It seems to be more portable to make both clauses /d delete actions as I've done.
The revised command incorporating the above is:
sed -e '/^\s*#.*$/d' -e '/^\s*$/d' inputFile
This tiny jewel removes all # comments, no matter where they begin in a line (see caution below):
sed -e 's/\s*#.*$//'
Example:
text="
this is a # test
#this is a test
#this is a #test
this is # another #test
"
$echo "$text" | sed -e 's/\s*#.*$//'
this is a
this is
Next this removes any resulting blank lines:
$echo "$text" | sed -e 's/\s*#.*$//' | sed -e '/^\s*$/d'
Caution: Depending on the syntax and/or interpretation of the lines your processing, this might not be an appropriate solution, as it just stupidly removes end of lines, even if the '#' is part of your data or code. However, for use cases where you'll never use a hash except for as an end of line comment then it works fine. So just as with all coding, context must be taken into consideration.
Alternative variant, using grep:
cat file.txt | grep -Ev '(#.*$)|(^$)'
you can use awk
awk 'NF{gsub(/^[ \t]*#/,"");print}' file
First example(paxdiablo) is very good except its not change file, just output result. If you want to change it inline:
sudo sed -i 's/#.*$//;/^$/d' inputFile
On (one of) my linux boxes, sed understands extended regular expressions with the -r option, so:
sed -r '/(^\s*#)|(^\s*$)/d' squid.conf.installed
is very useful for showing all non-blank, non comment lines.
The regex matches either start of line followed by zero or more spaces or tabs followed by either a hash or end of line, and deletes those matching lines from the input.

sed script to delete all characters up to & including the 2nd comma on a line

Can anyone explain how to use sed to delete all characters up to & including the 2nd comma on a line in a CSV file?
The beginning of a typical line might look like
1234567890,ABC/DEF, and the number of digits in the first column varies i.e. there might be 9 or 10 or 11 separate digits in random order, and the letters in the second column could also be random. This randomness and varying length makes it impossible to use any explicit pattern searching.
You could do it with sed like this
sed -e 's/^\([^,]*,\)\{2\}//'
not 100% sure on the syntax, I tried it, and it seems to work though. It'll delete zero-or-more of anything-but-a-comma followed by a comma, and all that is matched twice in succession.
But even easier would be to use cut, like this
cut -d, -f3-
which will use comma as a delimiter, and print fields 3 and up.
EDIT:
Just for the record, both sed and cut can work with a file as a parameter, just append it at the end like so
cut -d, -f3- myfile.txt
or you can pipe the output of your program through them
./myprogram | cut -d, -f3-
sed is not the "right" choice of tool (although it can be done). since you have structured data, you can use fields/delimiter method instead of creating complicated regex.
you can use cut
$ cut -f3- -d"," file
or gawk
$ gawk -F"," '{$1=$2=""}1' file
$ gawk -F"," '{for(i=3;i<NF;i++) printf "%s,",$i; print $NF}' file
Thanks for all replies - with the help provided I have written the simple executable script below which does what I want.
#!/bin/bash
cut -d, -f3- ~/Documents/forex_convert/input.csv |
sed -e '1d' \
-e 's/-/,/g' \
-e 's/ /,/g' \
-e 's/:/,/g' \
-e 's/,D//g' > ~/Documents/forex_convert/converted_input
exit