I am trying to use unix sed command to find line numbers that match a particular regular expression. The pattern of my file is below
A<20 spaces>
<something>
<something>
..
..
A<20 spaces>
<soemthing>
<something>
I need all the line numbers of A<20 spaces>
I used sed -n '/A[ ]{20}/'= <file_name> but it does not work. If I manually type in twenty spaces it does work.
Can some one please tweak the above command to make it work.
The braces in the expression need to be escaped with backslashes:
% sed -n '/A[ ]\{20\}/=' test.txt
1
6
An alternative would be to use -E to interpret regular expressions as extended (modern) regular expressions:
% sed -nE '/A[ ]{20}/=' test.txt
1
6
Or potentially use grep instead, which takes fewer characters to specify the same search:
% grep -n 'A[ ]\{20\}' test.txt
The correct syntax would be /A \{20\}/ (and I'm failing to understand where you got your syntax from).
edit: repeat a space, not an A. not my day
use the -E or the -r switch for extended regexp
just to be sur of the content request is answered because it literraly mean "20 spaces" and not Twenty " " char that everyone understand due to the sed line sample failing (i guess this the good one so other reply are fine in this case)
sed -n "/<20 spaces>/ =" file_name
Related
This question already has answers here:
Using different delimiters in sed commands and range addresses
(3 answers)
Closed 1 year ago.
I have a Visual Studio project, which is developed locally. Code files have to be deployed to a remote server. The only problem is the URLs they contain, which are hard-coded.
The project contains URLs such as ?page=one. For the link to be valid on the server, it must be /page/one .
I've decided to replace all URLs in my code files with sed before deployment, but I'm stuck on slashes.
I know this is not a pretty solution, but it's simple and would save me a lot of time. The total number of strings I have to replace is fewer than 10. A total number of files which have to be checked is ~30.
An example describing my situation is below:
The command I'm using:
sed -f replace.txt < a.txt > b.txt
replace.txt which contains all the strings:
s/?page=one&/pageone/g
s/?page=two&/pagetwo/g
s/?page=three&/pagethree/g
a.txt:
?page=one&
?page=two&
?page=three&
Content of b.txt after I run my sed command:
pageone
pagetwo
pagethree
What I want b.txt to contain:
/page/one
/page/two
/page/three
The easiest way would be to use a different delimiter in your search/replace lines, e.g.:
s:?page=one&:pageone:g
You can use any character as a delimiter that's not part of either string. Or, you could escape it with a backslash:
s/\//foo/
Which would replace / with foo. You'd want to use the escaped backslash in cases where you don't know what characters might occur in the replacement strings (if they are shell variables, for example).
The s command can use any character as a delimiter; whatever character comes after the s is used. I was brought up to use a #. Like so:
s#?page=one&#/page/one#g
A very useful but lesser-known fact about sed is that the familiar s/foo/bar/ command can use any punctuation, not only slashes. A common alternative is s#foo#bar#, from which it becomes obvious how to solve your problem.
add \ before special characters:
s/\?page=one&/page\/one\//g
etc.
In a system I am developing, the string to be replaced by sed is input text from a user which is stored in a variable and passed to sed.
As noted earlier on this post, if the string contained within the sed command block contains the actual delimiter used by sed - then sed terminates on syntax error. Consider the following example:
This works:
$ VALUE=12345
$ echo "MyVar=%DEF_VALUE%" | sed -e s/%DEF_VALUE%/${VALUE}/g
MyVar=12345
This breaks:
$ VALUE=12345/6
$ echo "MyVar=%DEF_VALUE%" | sed -e s/%DEF_VALUE%/${VALUE}/g
sed: -e expression #1, char 21: unknown option to `s'
Replacing the default delimiter is not a robust solution in my case as I did not want to limit the user from entering specific characters used by sed as the delimiter (e.g. "/").
However, escaping any occurrences of the delimiter in the input string would solve the problem.
Consider the below solution of systematically escaping the delimiter character in the input string before having it parsed by sed.
Such escaping can be implemented as a replacement using sed itself, this replacement is safe even if the input string contains the delimiter - this is since the input string is not part of the sed command block:
$ VALUE=$(echo ${VALUE} | sed -e "s#/#\\\/#g")
$ echo "MyVar=%DEF_VALUE%" | sed -e s/%DEF_VALUE%/${VALUE}/g
MyVar=12345/6
I have converted this to a function to be used by various scripts:
escapeForwardSlashes() {
# Validate parameters
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
echo -e "Error - no parameter specified!"
return 1
fi
# Perform replacement
echo ${1} | sed -e "s#/#\\\/#g"
return 0
}
this line should work for your 3 examples:
sed -r 's#\?(page)=([^&]*)&#/\1/\2#g' a.txt
I used -r to save some escaping .
the line should be generic for your one, two three case. you don't have to do the sub 3 times
test with your example (a.txt):
kent$ echo "?page=one&
?page=two&
?page=three&"|sed -r 's#\?(page)=([^&]*)&#/\1/\2#g'
/page/one
/page/two
/page/three
replace.txt should be
s/?page=/\/page\//g
s/&//g
please see this article
http://netjunky.net/sed-replace-path-with-slash-separators/
Just using | instead of /
Great answer from Anonymous. \ solved my problem when I tried to escape quotes in HTML strings.
So if you use sed to return some HTML templates (on a server), use double backslash instead of single:
var htmlTemplate = "<div style=\\"color:green;\\"></div>";
A simplier alternative is using AWK as on this answer:
awk '$0="prefix"$0' file > new_file
You may use an alternative regex delimiter as a search pattern by backs lashing it:
sed '\,{some_path},d'
For the s command:
sed 's,{some_path},{other_path},'
We have a process which can use a file containing sed commands to alter piped input.
I need to replace a placeholder in the input with a variable value, e.g. in a single -e type of command I can run;
$ echo "Today is XX" | sed -e "s/XX/$(date +%F)/"
Today is 2012-10-11
However I can only specify the sed aspects in a file (and then point the process at the file), E.g. a file called replacements.sed might contain;
s/XX/Thursday/
So obviously;
$ echo "Today is XX" | sed -f replacements.sed
Today is Thursday
If I want to use an environment variable or shell value, though, I can't find a way to make it expand, e.g. if replacements.txt contains;
s/XX/$(date +%F)/
Then;
$ echo "Today is XX" | sed -f replacements.sed
Today is $(date +%F)
Including double quotes in the text of the file just prints the double quotes.
Does anyone know a way to be able to use variables in a sed file?
This might work for you (GNU sed):
cat <<\! > replacements.sed
/XX/{s//'"$(date +%F)"'/;s/.*/echo '&'/e}
!
echo "Today is XX" | sed -f replacements.sed
If you don't have GNU sed, try:
cat <<\! > replacements.sed
/XX/{
s//'"$(date +%F)"'/
s/.*/echo '&'/
}
!
echo "Today is XX" | sed -f replacements.sed | sh
AFAIK, it's not possible. Your best bet will be :
INPUT FILE
aaa
bbb
ccc
SH SCRIPT
#!/bin/sh
STRING="${1//\//\\/}" # using parameter expansion to prevent / collisions
shift
sed "
s/aaa/$STRING/
" "$#"
COMMAND LINE
./sed.sh "fo/obar" <file path>
OUTPUT
fo/obar
bbb
ccc
As others have said, you can't use variables in a sed script, but you might be able to "fake" it using extra leading input that gets added to your hold buffer. For example:
[ghoti#pc ~/tmp]$ cat scr.sed
1{;h;d;};/^--$/g
[ghoti#pc ~/tmp]$ sed -f scr.sed <(date '+%Y-%m-%d'; printf 'foo\n--\nbar\n')
foo
2012-10-10
bar
[ghoti#pc ~/tmp]$
In this example, I'm using process redirection to get input into sed. The "important" data is generated by printf. You could cat a file instead, or run some other program. The "variable" is produced by the date command, and becomes the first line of input to the script.
The sed script takes the first line, puts it in sed's hold buffer, then deletes the line. Then for any subsequent line, if it matches a double dash (our "macro replacement"), it substitutes the contents of the hold buffer. And prints, because that's sed's default action.
Hold buffers (g, G, h, H and x commands) represent "advanced" sed programming. But once you understand how they work, they open up new dimensions of sed fu.
Note: This solution only helps you replace entire lines. Replacing substrings within lines may be possible using the hold buffer, but I can't imagine a way to do it.
(Another note: I'm doing this in FreeBSD, which uses a different sed from what you'll find in Linux. This may work in GNU sed, or it may not; I haven't tested.)
I am in agreement with sputnick. I don't believe that sed would be able to complete that task.
However, you could generate that file on the fly.
You could change the date to a fixed string, like
__DAYOFWEEK__.
Create a temp file, use sed to replace __DAYOFWEEK__ with $(date +%Y).
Then parse your file with sed -f $TEMPFILE.
sed is great, but it might be time to use something like perl that can generate the date on the fly.
To add a newline in the replacement expression using a sed file, what finally worked for me is escaping a literal newline. Example: to append a newline after the string NewLineHere, then this worked for me:
#! /usr/bin/sed -f
s/NewLineHere/NewLineHere\
/g
Not sure it matters but I am on Solaris unix, so not GNU sed for sure.
I am trying to write a sed expression that can remove urls from a file
example
http://samgovephotography.blogspot.com/ updated my blog just a little bit ago. Take a chance to check out my latest work. Hope all is well:)
Meet Former Child Star & Author Melissa Gilbert 6/15/09 at LA's B&N https://hollywoodmomblog.com/?p=2442 Thx to HMB Contributor #kdpartak :)
But I dont get it:
sed 's/[\w \W \s]*http[s]*:\/\/\([\w \W]\)\+[\w \W \s]*/ /g' posFile
FIXED!!!!!
handles almost all cases, even malformed URLs
sed 's/[\w \W \s]*http[s]*[a-zA-Z0-9 : \. \/ ; % " \W]*/ /g' positiveTweets | grep "http" | more
The following removes http:// or https:// and everything up until the next space:
sed -e 's!http\(s\)\{0,1\}://[^[:space:]]*!!g' posFile
updated my blog just a little bit ago. Take a chance to check out my latest work. Hope all is well:)
Meet Former Child Star & Author Melissa Gilbert 6/15/09 at LA's B&N Thx to HMB Contributor #kdpartak :)
Edit:
I should have used:
sed -e 's!http[s]\?://\S*!!g' posFile
"[s]\?" is a far more readable way of writing "an optional s" compared to "\(s\)\{0,1\}"
"\S*" a more readable version of "any non-space characters" than "[^[:space:]]*"
I must have been using the sed that came installed with my Mac at the time I wrote this answer (brew install gnu-sed FTW).
There are better URL regular expressions out there (those that take into account schemes other than HTTP(S), for instance), but this will work for you, given the examples you give. Why complicate things?
The accepted answer provides the approach that I used to remove URLs, etc. from my files. However it left "blank" lines. Here is a solution.
sed -i -e 's/http[s]\?:\/\/\S*//g ; s/www\.\S*//g ; s/ftp:\S*//g' input_file
perl -i -pe 's/^'`echo "\012"`'${2,}//g' input_file
The GNU sed flags, expressions used are:
-i Edit in-place
-e [-e script] --expression=script : basically, add the commands in script
(expression) to the set of commands to be run while processing the input
^ Match start of line
$ Match end of line
? Match one or more of preceding regular expression
{2,} Match 2 or more of preceding regular expression
\S* Any non-space character; alternative to: [^[:space:]]*
However,
sed -i -e 's/http[s]\?:\/\/\S*//g ; s/www\.\S*//g ; s/ftp:\S*//g'
leaves nonprinting character(s), presumably \n (newlines). Standard sed-based approaches to remove "blank" lines, tabs and spaces, e.g.
sed -i 's/^[ \t]*//; s/[ \t]*$//'
do not work, here: if you do not use a "branch label" to process newlines, you cannot replace them using sed (which reads input one line at a time).
The solution is to use the following perl expression:
perl -i -pe 's/^'`echo "\012"`'${2,}//g'
which uses a shell substitution,
'`echo "\012"`'
to replace an octal value
\012
(i.e., a newline, \n), that occurs 2 or more times,
{2,}
(otherwise we would unwrap all lines), with something else; here:
//
i.e., nothing.
[The second reference below provides a wonderful table of these values!]
The perl flags used are:
-p Places a printing loop around your command,
so that it acts on each line of standard input
-i Edit in-place
-e Allows you to provide the program as an argument,
rather than in a file
References:
perl flags: Perl flags -pe, -pi, -p, -w, -d, -i, -t?
ASCII control codes: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/unix-linux-sed-ascii-control-codes-nonprintable/
remove URLs: sed to remove URLs from a file
branch labels: How can I replace a newline (\n) using sed?
GNU sed manual: https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/sed.html
quick regex guide: https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/html_node/Regular-Expressions.html
Example:
$ cat url_test_input.txt
Some text ...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4283344/sed-to-remove-urls-from-a-file
https://www.google.ca/search?dcr=0&ei=QCsyWtbYF43YjwPpzKyQAQ&q=python+remove++citations&oq=python+remove++citations&gs_l=psy-ab.3...1806.1806.0.2004.1.1.0.0.0.0.61.61.1.1.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.0.0....0.-cxpNc6youY
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.feature_extraction.text.TfidfVectorizer.html
https://bbengfort.github.io/tutorials/2016/05/19/text-classification-nltk-sckit-learn.html
http://datasynce.org/2017/05/sentiment-analysis-on-python-through-textblob/
https://www.google.ca/?q=halifax&gws_rd=cr&dcr=0&ei=j7UyWuGKM47SjwOq-ojgCw
http://www.google.ca/?q=halifax&gws_rd=cr&dcr=0&ei=j7UyWuGKM47SjwOq-ojgCw
www.google.ca/?q=halifax&gws_rd=cr&dcr=0&ei=j7UyWuGKM47SjwOq-ojgCw
ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1000genomes/ftp/alignment_indices/20100804.alignment.index
Some more text.
$ sed -e 's/http[s]\?:\/\/\S*//g ; s/www\.\S*//g ; s/ftp:\S*//g' url_test_input.txt > a
$ cat a
Some text ...
Some more text.
$ perl -i -pe 's/^'`echo "\012"`'${2,}//g' a
Some text ...
Some more text.
$
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.
How can I make sed filter matching lines according to some expression, but ignore non-matching lines, instead of letting them print?
As a real example, I want to run scalac (the Scala compiler) on a set of files, and read from its -verbose output the .class files created. scalac -verbose outputs a bunch of messages, but we're only interested in those of the form [wrote some-class-name.class].
What I'm currently doing is this (|& is bash 4.0's way to pipe stderr to the next program):
$ scalac -verbose some-file.scala ... |& sed 's/^\[wrote \(.*\.class\)\]$/\1/'
This will extract the file names from the messages we're interested in, but will also let all other messages pass through unchanged! Of course we could do instead this:
$ scalac -verbose some-file.scala ... |& grep '^\[wrote .*\.class\]$' |
sed 's/^\[wrote \(.*\.class\)\]$/\1/'
which works but looks very much like going around the real problem, which is how to instruct sed to ignore non-matching lines from the input. So how do we do that?
If you don't want to print lines that don't match, you can use the combination of
-n option which tells sed not to print
p flag which tells sed to print what is matched
This gives:
sed -n 's/.../.../p'
Another way with plain sed:
sed -e 's/.../.../;t;d'
s/// is a substituion, t without any label conditionally skips all following commands, d deletes line.
No need for perl or grep.
(edited after Nicholas Riley's suggestion)
Rapsey raised a relevant point about multiple substitutions expressions.
First, quoting an Unix SE answer, you can "prefix most sed commands with an address to limit the lines to which they apply".
Second, you can group commands within curly braces {} (separated with a semi-colon ; or a new line)
Third, add the print flag p on the last substitution
Syntax:
sed -n -e '/^given_regexp/ {s/regexp1/replacement1/flags1;[...];s/regexp1/replacement1/flagsnp}'
Example (see Here document for more details):
Code:
sed -n -e '/^ha/ {s/h/k/g;s/a/e/gp}' <<SAMPLE
haha
hihi
SAMPLE
Result:
keke
sed -n '/.../!p'
There is no need for a substitution.