Getting output on the same line of a file in DOS? - command-line

If I have output from two sources that I want to put together on the same line, how would I do that?
In my case I have a file and a program. The file is something like this:
listOfThings=
My program outputs a list of strings on a single line. I want have a small script that runs nightly to put these two things together on a single line. I can't figure out how to do this right though
example batch file
type header.txt > outputfile.txt
myProgram >> outputfile.txt
which results in this:
listOfThings=
foo bar baz etc
I really need the output file to have the list immediately follow the =, but I can't figure out how to do it with the >> operator. (and before anyone suggests it, I can't do something like put a \ on the end of the listOfThings= line, that won't work for what I'm trying to do)

You need to make sure that the contents of header.txt does not have a carriage return linefeed pair in it. Look at it with a hex editor and make sure there is no 0x0d0a in it.

Have you made sure that header.txt doesn't have any line separators in it at all? (Ie, the = is the very last byte of the file).
Also, try copying header.txt to outputfile.txt in case type is appending a line feed on it's own.

Related

Perl Command Understanding

I have been working on a product code to resolve an issue but am stuck on a line of code
Can anyone help me understand what exactly does this command do?
perl -MText::CSV -lne 'BEGIN{$p = Text::CSV->new()} print join "|", $p->fields() if $p->parse($_)' /home/daily/${FULL_FILENAME} > /home/output.txt
I think its to copy the file to my home location with some transformations but not sure exactly
This is a slightly broken program that translates a comma-separated values (CSV) file to a pipe-separated values file.
The particular command-line switches are documented in perlrun. This is a "one-liner", so you can read about those to see what's going on there.
The Text::CSV module deals with CSV files, and the program is parsing a line from the file and re-outputting as a pipe-separated file.
But, this program deals with each line as a complete record. That might be fine for you, but at some point you might end up with a literal value that has a newline in it, like a,"b\nc",d. Now reading line-by-line breaks the program since the quotes appear to be unclosed within the first line. Note only that, it blindly concatenates the parsed fields without considering if any of the fields should be quoted. It might be unlikely that a pipe character would be in the data, but the problem isn't it's rarity but the consequences and costliness when it does show up.
The rewrite.pl example script in the related module Text::CSV_XS is a tool that could replace this one-liner. It properly reads the input and knows how to properly translate it.

i would like to extract the pspictures from a tex file and put the in another file so they can processed into ps or pdf files really easily

I have a list of files .tex file that contain fragments in the tex that build ps pictures which can be slow to process.
There are multiple fragments across multiple files and the end delimiter is \end{pspicture}
% this is the beginning of the fragment
\begin{pspicture}(0,0)(23,5)
\rput{0}(0,3){\crdKs}
\rput(1,3){\crdtres}
\rput(5,3){\crdAh}
\rput(6,3){\crdKh}
\rput(7,3){\crdsixh}
\rput(8,3){\crdtreh}
\rput(12,3){\crdQd}
\rput(13,3){\crdeigd}
\rput(14,3){\crdsixd}
\rput(15,3){\crdfived}
\rput(16,3){\crdtwod}
\rput(20,3){\crdKc}
\rput(21,3){\crdfourc}
\end{pspicture}
I would like to extract the fragments.
I am not sure how to go about this? can awk do this or sed?
They seem to work line by line, rather than work on the whole fragment.
I am not really looking for a solution just a good candidate tool.
sed -En '/^\\begin\{pspicture\}.*$/,/^\\end\{pspicture\}.*$/p' file
Utilising sed with -E for regular expressions.
Use //,// to determine start and ending regular expressions and print all lines from the start to the end.

Problems with Wget64

Attempting to write a Wget to get and save Vanguard pricing data. So far I have 2 statements that both work correctly from the Command Line when I paste the string. When I save the string as a bat file one works and the other gives an unexpected result.
The string that works correctly in both places is:
Wget64 --output-document=C:\Users\Default\downloads\VVA_Daily_Portfolio-%DATE:~-4%-%DATE:~4,2%-%DATE:~7,2%.html "https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/annuities/variable"
The string that only works in the Command Line and not as a bat file is:
Wget64 --output-document=C:\Users\Default\downloads\VVA_Fund64_History-%DATE:~-4%-%DATE:~4,2%-%DATE:~7,2%.html "https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/tools/pricehistorysearch?radio=1&results=get&FundType=VVAP&FundIntExt=INT&FundId=0064&fundName=0064&fundValue=0064&radiobutton2=1&beginDate=03%2F01%2F2017&endDate=12%2F31%2F2017&year=#res"
Can someone help me write the script so that the expected result is achieved. I suspect that the Vanguard website can tell the difference between a Command Line vs bat file query, or that there is something inherently different between the two methods of execution.
ANy assistance is appreciated. Dan
The cmd command parser behaves differently in command line and batch files. In this case, the main problem is the variable expansion. In command line when a variable does not contain a value (it is undefined), the variable read operation is not removed, but inside batch files the read operation is removed.
That means that something like echo(%thisDoesNotExist% will output (under the assumption the variable does not exist) %thisDoesNotExist% in command line and nothing in batch file.
What relation has this with your problem?
If we split your wget in parts you have
Wget64
--output-document="C:\Us ... y-%DATE:~-4%-%DATE:~4,2%-%DATE:~7,2%.html"
^........^ ^.........^ ^.........^
"https://pe ... h?radio=1& ... &beginDate=03%2F01%2F2017&endDate=12%2F31%2F2017&year=#res"
^....^ ^....^
You can see where the parser tries to resolve variables, correctly in the output case and incorrectly (from the purpouse of the command point of view) in the URL.
You need to escape (by doubling them) the percent signs that are not part of a variable read operation, ex. ... beginDate=03%%2F01%%2F2017&...

Use a variable as a file name for pdflatex

I've used MATLAB and pdfLatex but now I'm trying to combine them. I've found that you can call pdflatex with a ! in MATLAB and that seems to work but I want the filename that get's latexed to be dynamic (i.e. a variable) Here is my code (MATLAB) functionally.
for loop starts here
filename = concatinate(these variables/text strings.tex)
open file
write (fprintf) this latex code to filename (this part works)
close file
!pdflatex filename
for loop ends here
If I type the exact file name (file.tex) after !pdflatex it works, but the filename changes and I need it to produce about 80 files. Is there a way to make pdflatex evaluate the variable so that I can create these files in the code instead of one by one?
Thanks. Gizm0
Update: Thanks to #Luis Mendo my program is now calling pdflatex and working on some of the files, but I am getting this error on many lines.
! Text line contains an invalid character.
Here is an example of one of the lines:
\noindent
When I copied and pasted the line above that is what showed up, but the line on the screen looks like this:
\noindent Good Instructor. \\
If I retype the line it works fine, but there is something weird about the way MATLAB is writing the line to the tex file that is making it invalid. The \noindent and \ are printed directly. "Good Instructor." comes from a variable.
I tried converting the tex file to a txt file and now that line looks like this:
\noindent G o o d i n s t r u c t o r . \\
Any ideas?
Use system instead of !. It does the same thing but lets you build the string dynamically:
system(['pdflatex ' filename])

zip recursively each file in a dir, where the name of the file has spaces in it

I am quite stuck; I need to compress the content of a folder, where I have multiple files (extension .dat). I went for shell scripting.
So far I told myself that is not that hard: I just need to recursively read the content of the dir, get the name of the file and zip it, using the name of the file itself.
This is what I wrote:
for i in *.dat; do zip $i".zip" $i; done
Now when I try it I get a weird behavior: each file is called like "12/23/2012 data102 test1.dat"; and when I run this sequence of commands; I see that zip instead of recognizing the whole file name, see each part of the string as single entity, causing the whole operation to fail.
I told myself that I was doing something wrong, and that the i variable was wrong; so I have replaced echo, instead than the zip command (to see which one was the output of the i variable); and the $i output is the full name of the file, not part of it.
I am totally clueless at this point about what is going on...if the variable i is read by zip it reads each single piece of the string, instead of the whole thing, while if I use echo to see the content of that variable it gets the correct output.
Do I have to pass the value of the filename to zip in a different way? Since it is the content of a variable passed as parameter I was assuming that it won't matter if the string is one or has spaces in it, and I can't find in the man page the answer (if there is any in there).
Anyone knows why do I get this behavior and how to fix it? Thanks!
You need to quote anything with spaces in it.
zip "$i.zip" "$i"
Generally speaking, any variable interpolation should have double quotes unless you specifically require the shell to split it into multiple tokens. The internal field separator $IFS defaults to space and tab, but you can change it to make the shell do word splitting on arbitrary separators. See any decent beginners' shell tutorial for a detailed account of the shell's quoting mechanisms.