The file is initially
$cat so/app.yaml
application: SO
...
I run the following command. I get an empty file.
$sed s/SO/so/ so/app.yaml > so/app.yaml
$cat so/app.yaml
$
How can you use SED to edit the file and not giving me an empty file?
$ sed -i -e's/SO/so/' so/app.yaml
The -i means in-place.
The > used in piping will open the output file when the pipes are all set up, i.e. before command execution. Thus, the input file is truncated prior to sed executing. This is a problem with all shell redirection, not just with sed.
Sheldon Young's answer shows how to use in-place editing.
You are using the wrong tool for the job. sed is a stream editor (that's why it's called sed), so it's for in-flight editing of streams in a pipe. ed OTOH is a file editor, which can do everything sed can do, except it works on files instead of streams. (Actually, it's the other way round: ed is the original utility and sed is a clone that avoids having to create temporary files for streams.)
ed works very much like sed (because sed is just a clone), but with one important difference: you can move around in files, but you can't move around in streams. So, all commands in ed take an address parameter that tells ed, where in the file to apply the command. In your case, you want to apply the command everywhere in the file, so the address parameter is just , because a,b means "from line a to line b" and the default for a is 1 (beginning-of-file) and the default for b is $ (end-of-file), so leaving them both out means "from beginning-of-file to end-of-file". Then comes the s (for substitute) and the rest looks much like sed.
So, your sed command s/SO/so/ turns into the ed command ,s/SO/so/.
And, again because ed is a file editor, and more precisely, an interactive file editor, we also need to write (w) the file and quit (q) the editor.
This is how it looks in its entirety:
ed -- so/app.yaml <<-HERE
,s/SO/so/
w
q
HERE
See also my answer to a similar question.
What happens in your case, is that executing a pipeline is a two-stage process: first construct the pipeline, then run it. > means "open the file, truncate it, and connect it to filedescriptor 1 (stdout)". Only then is the pipe actually run, i.e. sed is executed, but at this time, the file has already been truncated.
Some versions of sed also have a -i parameter for in-place editing of files, that makes sed behave a little more like ed, but using that is not advisable: first of all, it doesn't support all the features of ed, but more importantly, it is a non-standardized proprietary extension of GNU sed that doesn't work on many non-GNU systems. It's been a while since I used a non-GNU system, but last I used one, neither Solaris nor OpenBSD nor HP-UX nor IBM AIX sed supported the -i parameter.
I believe that redirecting output into the same file you are editing is causing your problem.
You need redirect standard output to some temporary file and when sed is done overwrite the original file by the temporary one.
Related
I would request some help with a basic shell script that should do the following job.
File a particular word from a given file (file path is always constant)
Backup the file
Delete the specific word or replace the word with ;
Save the file changes
Example
File Name - abc.cfg
Contains the following lines
network;private;Temp;Windows;System32
I've used the following SED command for the operation
sed -i -e "/Temp;/d" abc.cfg
The output is not as expected. The complete line is removed instead of just the word Temp;
Any help would be appreciated. Thank you
sed matches against lines, and /d is the delete directive, which is why you get a deleted line. Instead, use substitution to replace the offending word with nothing:
sed 's/Temp;//g' abc.cfg
The /g modifier means "globlal", in case the offending word appears more than once. I would hold off on the -i (inline) flag until you are sure of your command, in general, or use -i .backup.
Thank you. I used your suggestion but couldn't get through. I appreciate the input though.
I was able to achieve this using the following SED syntax
sed -e "s/Temp//g" -i.backup abc.cfg
I wanted to take the backup before the change & hence -i was helpful.
I'm trying to replace the word in shell script with sed -e command but its not replacing , please help on that, i have tried the below
we have separate file in /data/docs/config.log, in that file there is a word ?account for example ,
username acc, passsword acc, ?account.name
this ?account word needs to be replaced with word 'GLOBAL' using sed -e command ,
reacc = GLOBAL
sed -e "s/?account/$reacc/g" /data/docs/config.log > /data/docs/newconfig.log
but here the file newconfig.log has created with 0 size , no output written to the file , its not replacing its an empty file,
the output should be username acc, passsword acc, GLOBAL.name in newconfig.log
Being the only person who can reproduce the problem, you are pretty much on your own. There are plenty of things you can do to analyze the problem, though.
Double-check the shell. Don't have blind faith in #!/bin/sh. In cygwin for example, /bin/sh is an alias for bash. Verify with: echo $SHELL
Check permissions and file system. Do you have rights to write to the output file? Is the disk full? Does cat /data/docs/config.log > /data/docs/newconfig.log work? Test again in a different folder.
Double-check the output file. Is it really empty, or is the file system just slow with updating the file size? Is sed really finished? Test without output redirection; see if the output is dumped to stdout.
Test with a small file; one or two lines is enough.
If even that does not work, then test sed itself. Who knows, maybe you have a weird alias that hides the real sed. The most trivial filter is sed -e '', which should simply echo every line you type (just like cat without parameters). Does that work? Then try some simple patterns.
Systematically iterate between test cases that succeed and test case that fail, until you have found the breaking point. Doing so, you should be able to find the cause. Sorry, that's all I can do for you right now.
Remove spaces around =. Try after making
reacc=GLOBAL
I'm trying to do use the sed command in a shell script where I want to remove lines that read STARTremoveThisComment and lines that read removeThisCommentEND.
I'm able to do it when I copy it to a new file using
sed 's/STARTremoveThisComment//' > test
But how do I do this by using the same file as input and output?
sed -i (or the extended version, --in-place) will automate the process normally done with less advanced implementations, that of sending output to temporary file, then renaming that back to the original.
The -i is for in-place editing, and you can also provide a backup suffix for keeping a copy of the original:
sed -i.bak fileToChange
sed --in-place=.bak fileToChange
Both of those will keep the original file in fileToChange.bak.
Keep in mind that in-place editing may not be available in all sed implementations but it is in GNU sed which should be available on all variants of Linux, as per your tags.
If you're using a more primitive implementation, you can use something like:
cp oldfile oldfile.bak && sed 'whatever' oldfile >newfile && mv newfile oldfile
You can use the flag -i for in-place editing and the -e for specifying normal script expression:
sed -i -e 's/pattern_to_search/text_to_replace/' file.txt
To delete lines that match a certain pattern you can use the simpler syntax. Notice the d flag:
sed -i '/pattern_to_search/d' file.txt
You really should not use sed for that. This question seems to come up ridiculously often, and it seems very strange that it does since the general solution is so trivial. It seems bizarre that people want to know how to do it in sed, and in python, and in ruby, etc. If you want to have a filter operate on an input and overwrite it, use the following simple script:
#!/bin/sh -e
in=${1?No input file specified}
mv $in ${bak=.$in.bak}
shift
"$#" < $bak > $in
Put that in your path in an executable file name inline, and then the problem is solved in general. For example:
inline input-file sed -e s/foo/bar/g
Now, if you want to add logic to keep multiple backups, or if you have some options to change the backup naming scheme, or whatever, you fix it in one place. What's the command line option to get 1-up counters on the backup file when processing a file in-place with perl? What about with ruby? Is the option different for gnu-sed? How does awk handle it? The whole friggin' point of unix is that tools do one thing only. Handling logic for backup files is a second thing, and needs to be factored out. If you are implementing a tool, do not add logic to create backup files. Tell your users to use a 2nd tool for that. Integration is bad. Modularity is good. That is the unix way.
Notice that this script has several problems. The permissions/mode of the input file may be changed, for example. I'm sure there are innumerable other issues. However, by putting the backup logic in a wrapper script, you localize all of these issues and don't have to worry that sed overwrites the files and changes mode, while python keeps the file in place and does not change the inode (I made up those two cases, the point being that not all tools will use the same logic, while the wrapper script will.)
As far as I know it is not possible to use the same file for input and output. Though one solution is make a shell script which will save it to another file, delete the old input and rename the output to the input file name.
sed -e s/try/this/g input.file > output.file;mv output.file input.file
I suggest using sponge
sponge reads standard input and writes it out to the specified file.
Unlike a shell redirect, sponge soaks up all its input before writing
the output file. This allows constructing pipelines that read from and
write to the same file.
cat test | sed 's/STARTremoveThisComment//' | sponge test
I am looking for a safe and reliable way to overwrite ONE line in a text file. I don't care if it's using sed, grep, perl whatever. It just needs to be portable and reliable. Specifically what I am trying to do is replace the value of a variable I have saved in a text file at runtime. Let's say I have a file named variables.txt which contains a line that reads userName=stephen. Let's say my program wants to change the userName to frank. Here's what I've come up with using sed:
sed -i '' 's/userName.*/userName=frank/' variables.txt
The concern I have with this is that I've read that on some versions of sed using the '-i' switch without specifying a backup file could cause the command to fail or risk possible file corruption. Not an option. What do you guys think?
Edit
For those asking where I read about command failure and file corruption. The manpage for my version of sed recommends against providing an empty value for the -i switch as well as take a look at the comments on this page here:
It seems that some versions of sed require the argument after -i and others do not. With GNU sed version 4.1.x, it seems that the -i does not require an argument and specifying an empty argument after it actually fails.
It sounds like the unanimous recommendation is to provide a backup file and then delete it after the command completes. However I'm still concerned about this solution since my version of sed doesn't even support the --version switch. My primary concern here is that the solution is both reliable and portable.
t=`tempfile`
sed -e 's/userName.*/userName=frank/' variables.txt >$tempfile
cp $tempfile >variables.txt
rm $tempfile
you can also use mv but that won't preserve file rights
if tempfile is not available then use some other method ($$.bak) to create the filename.
As long as you don't run on windows, sed -i is as safe as anything. Even if the machine crashes mid-process, variables.txt will either have the old content or the new content -- it should never be missing or corrupt.
The concern I have with this is that I've read that on some versions of sed using the '-i' switch without specifying a backup file could cause the command to fail or risk possible file corruption.
Where have you read it?
It is not strictly true: this is not an usual problem in sed but all programs (including sed) can fail and in very unlikely situations corrupt data. So you should not be too afraid of data corruption with sed.
Anyway, why do you not use -i with an extension (such as -i.bak) for granting more safety? In any case you can erase the backup file with rm...
You could copy variables.txt to variables.txt.bak before running the command if you wanted to keep a backup. Or go the other way around:
sed 's/userName.*/userName=frank/' variables.txt > variables.txt.fixed
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
cp variables.txt.fixed variables.txt
fi
I need to make a change in the php.ini configuration file via sed (or similar).
I need to add the following text:
extension=solr.so
The line has to be added as line number 941 in the configuration file. However, if the file is already there, it should not be added again.
I guess there are two approaches: 1) replace line 941 with the text, or 2) search for the text and add it to line 941 if there are not matches.
I have the following command that works fine, except that the line is added again if the script is run again:
sed '941i\
extension=solr.so' /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini > /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
How can I make sure that this command does not add the line if it is already there?
The easiest way would be to test before using grep, for example:
grep -q -e 'extension=solr.so' file || sed '...'
Also, it is estrange that you need exactly that line. You should add it at the end, or something like that.
Also, note that taking the same file as input and output never should be done. This can damage the file badly. You should be using the -i sed parameter to do in-place editing.