Powershell variable preceded by = does not evaluate - powershell

I'm writing some PowerShell scripts to work with our source control software (which is not a PowerShell cmdlet) and I'm running into a problem using variables as command line arguments when they are preceded by an =, like this:
cm mklabel lb:BL$baseline -c=$comment
This ends up create a label in with the comment of "$comment". If I put a space after the =, it looks like it evaluates the variable properly, but the command does not associate the comment with -c argument anymore. Is there a way to force the variable to be evaluated despite the =?

Try:
cm mklabel lb:BL$baseline -c=($comment)

Try
cm mklabel lb:BL$baseline "-c=$comment"

Related

PowerShell - Merge two variables into one

I'm learning PowerShell so please forgive (what I'm sure is) a simple question.
I'm used to coding BATCH scripts and if I wanted to merge %USERDOMAIN% and %USERNAME% I would:
set zFullUsername=%USERDOMAIN%\%USERNAME%
echo %zFullUsername%
How can I do the same in PowerShell?
Thank you for your time.
On a supported Operating System, I wouldn't even bother with environment variables for this:
$zFullUsername = whoami
Then just access it as required:
$zFullUsername
In PowerShell, you can access environment variables in a few different ways. The way I recommend is to use the $env:VAR variable to access them.
$user = $env:USERNAME
$domain = $env:USERDOMAIN
echo "$domain\$user"
Note: \ is not an escape character in the PowerShell parser, ` is.
Similarly to rendering the echo command (echo is an alias of Write-Output btw) you can create a username variable like so:
$fullUserName = "$domain\$user"
Or you can skip right to creating $fullUserName straight from the environment variables:
$fullUserName = "${env:USERDOMAIN}\${env:USERNAME}"
Note: When variables have non-alphanumeric characters in them, the ${} sequence tells PowerShell everything between the ${} is part of the variable name to expand.
It seems the : in $env:VAR is actually an exception to this rule, as"Username: $env:USERNAME" does render correctly. So the ${} sequence above is optional.
To avoid confusion when trying to apply this answer in other areas, if you needed to insert the value of an object property or some other expression within a string itself, you would use a sub-expression within the string instead, which is the $() sequence:
$someVar = "Name: $($someObject.Name)"
When using either ${} or $(), whitespace is not allowed to pad the outer {} or ().

Variable not being recognized after "read"

-- Edit : Resolved. See answer.
Background:
I'm writing a shell that will perform some extra actions required on our system when someone resizes a database.
The shell is written in ksh (requirement), the OS is Solaris 5.10 .
The problem is with one of the checks, which verifies there's enough free space on the underlying OS.
Problem:
The check reads the df -k line for root, which is what I check in this step, and prints it to a file. I then "read" the contents into variables which I use in calculations.
Unfortunately, when I try to run an arithmetic operation on one of the variables, I get an error indicating it is null. And a debug output line I've placed after that line verifies that it is null... It lost it's value...
I've tried every method of doing this I could find online, they work when I run it manually, but not inside the shell file.
(* The file does have #!/usr/bin/ksh)
Code:
df -k | grep "rpool/ROOT" > dftest.out
RPOOL_NAME=""; declare -i TOTAL_SIZE=0; USED_SPACE=0; AVAILABLE_SPACE=0; AVAILABLE_PERCENT=0; RSIGN=""
read RPOOL_NAME TOTAL_SIZE USED_SPACE AVAILABLE_SPACE AVAILABLE_PERCENT RSIGN < dftest.out
\rm dftest.out
echo $RPOOL_NAME $TOTAL_SIZE $USED_SPACE $AVAILABLE_SPACE $AVAILABLE_PERCENT $RSIGN
((TOTAL_SIZE=$TOTAL_SIZE/1024))
This is the result:
DBResize.sh[11]: TOTAL_SIZE=/1024: syntax error
I'm pulling hairs at this point, any help would be appreciated.
The code you posted cannot produce the output you posted. Most obviously, the error is signalled at line 11 but you posted fewer than 11 lines of code. The previous lines may matter. Always post complete code when you ask for help.
More concretely, the declare command doesn't exist in ksh, it's a bash thing. You can achieve the same result with typeset (declare is a bash equivalent to typeset, but not all options are the same). Either you're executing this script with bash, or there's another error message about declare, or you've defined some additional commands including declare which may change the behavior of this code.
None of this should have an impact on the particular problem that you're posting about, however. The variables created by read remain assigned until the end of the subshell, i.e. until the code hits a ), the end of a pipe (left-hand side of the pipe only in ksh), etc.
About the use of declare or typeset, note that you're only declaring TOTAL_SIZE as an integer. For the other variables, you're just assigning a value which happens to consist exclusively of digits. It doesn't matter for the code you posted, but it's probably not what you meant.
One thing that may be happening is that grep matches nothing, and therefore read reads an empty line. You should check for errors. Use set -e in scripts to exit at the first error. (There are cases where set -e doesn't catch errors, but it's a good start.)
Another thing that may be happening is that df is splitting its output onto multiple lines because the first column containing the filesystem name is too large. To prevent this splitting, pass the option -P.
Using a temporary file is fragile: the code may be executed in a read-only directory, another process may want to access the same file at the same time... Here a temporary file is useless. Just pipe directly into read. In ksh (unlike most other sh variants including bash), the right-hand side of a pipe runs in the main shell, so assignments to variables in the right-hand side of a pipe remain available in the following commands.
It doesn't matter in this particular script, but you can use a variable without $ in an arithmetic expression. Using $ substitutes a string which can have confusing results, e.g. a='1+2'; $((a*3)) expands to 7. Not using $ uses the numerical value (in ksh, a='1+2'; $((a*3)) expands to 9; in some sh implementations you get an error because a's value is not numeric).
#!/usr/bin/ksh
set -e
typeset -i TOTAL_SIZE=0 USED_SPACE=0 AVAILABLE_SPACE=0 AVAILABLE_PERCENT=0
df -Pk | grep "rpool/ROOT" | read RPOOL_NAME TOTAL_SIZE USED_SPACE AVAILABLE_SPACE AVAILABLE_PERCENT RSIGN
echo $RPOOL_NAME $TOTAL_SIZE $USED_SPACE $AVAILABLE_SPACE $AVAILABLE_PERCENT $RSIGN
((TOTAL_SIZE=TOTAL_SIZE/1024))
Strange...when I get rid of your "declare" line, your original code seems to work perfectly well (at least with ksh on Linux)
The code :
#!/bin/ksh
df -k | grep "/home" > dftest.out
read RPOOL_NAME TOTAL_SIZE USED_SPACE AVAILABLE_SPACE AVAILABLE_PERCENT RSIGN < dftest.out
\rm dftest.out
echo $RPOOL_NAME $TOTAL_SIZE $USED_SPACE $AVAILABLE_SPACE $AVAILABLE_PERCENT $RSIGN
((TOTAL_SIZE=$TOTAL_SIZE/1024))
print $TOTAL_SIZE
The result :
32962416 5732492 25552588 19% /home
5598
Which are the value a simple df -k is returning. The variables seem to last.
For those interested, I have figured out that it is not possible to use "read" the way I was using it.
The variable values assigned by "read" simply "do not last".
To remedy this, I have applied the less than ideal solution of using the standard "while read" format, and inside the loop, echo selected variables into a variable file.
Once said file was created, I just "loaded" it.
(pseudo code:)
LOOP START
echo "VAR_A="$VAR_A"; VAR_B="$VAR_B";" > somefile.out
LOOP END
. somefile.out

Uppercasing filename in Makefile using sed

I try to convert a filename such as foo/bar/baz.proto into something like foo/bar/Baz.java in my Makefile. For this purpose, I thought I could use sed. However, it seems that the command does not work as expected:
uppercase_file = $(shell echo "$(1)" | sed 's/\(.*\/\)\(.*\)/\1\u\2/')
# generated Java sources
PROTO_JAVA_TARGETS := ${PROTO_SPECS:$(SRCDIR)/%.proto=$(JAVAGEN)/$(call uppercase_file,%).java}
When I try to run the sed command on the command line it seems to work:
~$ echo "foo/bar/baz" | sed 's/\(.*\/\)\(.*\)/\1\u\2/'
foo/bar/Baz
Any ideas why this does not work inside the Makefile?
UPDATE:
The java files are generated with the following target:
$(JAVAGEN)/%.java: $(SRCDIR)/%.proto
How can I apply the substitution also for targets?
GNU Make does not replace % character in the replacement part of a substitution reference (which is basically a syntactic sugar for patsubst) if it is part of a variable reference. I have not found this behavior described in the documentation, but you can look it implemented in the source code (the relevant function I believe is find_char_unquote).
I suggest moving the call out of the substitution reference, since uppercase_file obviously works properly on any file path:
PROTO_JAVA_TARGETS := $(call uppercase_file,${PROTO_SPECS:$(SRCDIR)/%.proto=$(JAVAGEN)/%.java})
If $(PROTO_SPECS) resolves not to a single element, but rather to a list of elements, you can use foreach to call the function on every elements of a processed list:
PROTO_JAVA_TARGETS := $(foreach JAVA,${PROTO_SPECS:$(SRCDIR)/%.proto=$(JAVAGEN)/%.java},$(call uppercase_file,$(JAVA)))
The java files are generated with the following target: $(JAVAGEN)/%.java: $(SRCDIR)/%.proto
How can I apply the substitution also for targets?
Since Make matches targets first, and there is no way to run sed backwards, what you need here is either define an inverse function, or generate multiple explicit rules. I will show the latter approach.
define java_from_proto
$(call uppercase_file,$(1:$(SRCDIR)/%.proto=$(JAVAGEN)/%.java)): $1
# Whatever recipe you use.
# Use `$$#`, `$$<` and so on instead of `$#` or `$<`.
endef
$(foreach PROTO,$(PROTO_SPECS),$(eval $(call java_from_proto,$(PROTO))))
We basically generate one rule per file in $(PROTO_SPEC) using a multiline variable syntax, and then use eval to install that rule. There is also a very similar example on this documentation page that can be helpful.

Passing a variable to a command in a script

I've been searching all over the place and since I'm taking my first steps in PERL this might be one of he dumbest questions but here it goes.
So I'm creating a script to manage my windows and later bind it to keyboard shortcuts, so I I'm trying to run a command and passing some variables:
my $command = `wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -e 0,0,0,$monitors->{1}->{'width'}/2,$monitors->{1}->{'height'}`;
But I get an error saying I'm not passing the right parameters to the command, but if I do this, everything works great:
my $test = $monitors->{1}->{'width'}/2;
my $command = `wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -e 0,0,0,$test,$monitors->{1}->{'height'}`;
So do I really have to do this? assign it first to a variable and then pass it, or there's a more elegant way of doing it?
The backticks operator (or the qx{}) accepts A string which is (possibly) interpolated. So accepts string and not expression like $var/2.
Thats mean than the $variables ($var->{1}->{some} too) are expanded but not the arithmetic expressions.
Therefore your 2 step variant works, but not the first.
If you want evaluate an expression inside the string you can use the next:
my $ans=42;
print "The #{[ $ans/2 ]} is only the half of answer\n";
prints
The 21 is only the half of answer
but it is not very readable, so better and elegant is what you're already doing - calculate the command argument in andvace, and to the qx{} or backticks only pass the calculated $variables.

Using single Command line and variables.

how do you define a variable to an integer at the command line. For example if i want to assign A=22 and B=23 and then have the A and B = a separate variable such as C..? I am confused on the syntax of this at the command line. I understand how to set variables in a script but how would i do it from a command line using only 1 line?
A=22; B=23; ((C=A+B)); echo $A $B $C
Assuming Bash or Korn shell.
set A=22
set B=23
set A=%C%
set B=%C%
In windows bat-files. Also be careful not to use any extra spaces in batch file syntax. It can screw up everything.