"grep | xargs grep" with search conditions on different strings - unix

I want to grep files that contain text "wp_" but do not contain text "wp3_". E.g. I've got a file with two strings:
wp_123
wp3_123
I try $ grep -lr wp_ ~/tmp | xargs grep -vl wp3_
It outputs this file name! But if I remove the linebreak, it's working like I want, i.e. handles string "wp_123 wp3_123" correctly.
How to make it work with search conditions on different strings?
P.S. Sorry for kind of duplicate, but seems that nobody noticed my comment during last hour...

This should work
$ grep -lr 'wp_' ~/tmp | xargs grep -L 'wp3_'
The single quotes are not necessary in this case, but are a good habit to prevent pattern characters from being interpreted by the shell. In your original attempt, -vl means "print each file with at least one line that does not match". Here, -L means "print each file with no lines that match".

Related

How do I use grep to find words of specified or unspecified length?

In the Unix command line (CentOS7) I have to use the grep command to find all words with:
At least n characters
At most n characters
Exactly n characters
I have searched the posts here for answers and came up with grep -E '^.{8}' /sample/dir but this only gets me the words with at least 8 characters.
Using the $ at the end returns nothing. For example:
grep -E '^.{8}$' /sample/dir
I would also like to trim the info in /sample/dir so that I only see the specific information. I tried using a pipe:
cut -f1,7 -d: | grep -E '^.{8}' /sample/dir
Depending on the order, this only gets me one or the other, not both.
I only want the usernames at the beginning of each line, not all words in each line for the entire file.
For example, if I want to find userids on my system, these should be the results:
1.
tano-ahsoka
skywalker-a
kenobi-obiwan
ahsoka-t
luke-s
leia-s
ahsoka-t
kenobi-o
grievous
I'm looking for two responses here as I have already figured out number 1.
Numbers 2 and 3 are not working for some reason.
If possible, I'd also like to apply the cut for all three outputs.
Any and all help is appreciated, thank you!
You can run one grep for extracting the words, and another for filtering based on length.
grep -oE '(\w|-)+' file | grep -Ee '^.{8,}$'
grep -oE '(\w|-)+' file | grep -Ee '^.{,8}$'
grep -oE '(\w|-)+' file | grep -Ee '^.{8}$'
Update the pattern based on requirements and maybe use -r and specify a directory instead of a file. Adding -h option may also be needed to prevent the filenames from being printed.
Depending on your implementation of grep, it might work to use:
grep -o -E '\<\w{8}\>' # exactly 8
grep -o -E '\<\w{8,}\>' # 8 or more
grep -o -E '\<\w{,8}\>' # 8 or less

Unix grep duplicate vowels search

I am stuck on a homework question. The question asks to display the lines, with grep and I can't use -w option, that contain no duplicate vowels.
My teacher said to find the grep command that could display two or more 'a's in a line which would, I think, be grep 'a.*a' file and then find the grep command that would display two or more 'u's which, I think, would be grep 'u.*u' file, combine them and then I should be able to get it. But I don't know how I would combine the grep commands.
You can combine different regular expressions with |:
grep 'a.*a|e.*e|i.*i|o.*o|u.*u' file

Unix Pipes for Command Argument [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
How to pass command output as multiple arguments to another command
(5 answers)
Read expression for grep from standard input
(1 answer)
Closed last month.
I am looking for insight as to how pipes can be used to pass standard output as the arguments for other commands.
For example, consider this case:
ls | grep Hello
The structure of grep follows the pattern: grep SearchTerm PathOfFileToBeSearched. In the case I have illustrated, the word Hello is taken as the SearchTerm and the result of ls is used as the file to be searched. But what if I want to switch it around? What if I want the standard output of ls to be the SearchTerm, with the argument following grep being PathOfFileToBeSearched? In a general sense, I want to have control over which argument the pipe fills with the standard output of the previous command. Is this possible, or does it depend on how the script for the command (e.g., grep) was written?
Thank you so much for your help!
grep itself will be built such that if you've not specified a file name, it will open stdin (and thus get the output of ls). There's no real generic mechanism here - merely convention.
If you want the output of ls to be the search term, you can do this via the shell. Make use of a subshell and substitution thus:
$ grep $(ls) filename.txt
In this scenario ls is run in a subshell, and its stdout is captured and inserted in the command line as an argument for grep. Note that if the ls output contains spaces, this will cause confusion for grep.
There are basically two options for this: shell command substitution and xargs. Brian Agnew has just written about the former. xargs is a utility which takes its stdin and turns it into arguments of a command to execute. So you could run
ls | xargs -n1 -J % grep -- % PathOfFileToBeSearched
and it would, for each file output by ls, run grep -e filename PathOfFileToBeSearched to grep for the filename output by ls within the other file you specify. This is an unusual xargs invocation; usually it's used to add one or more arguments at the end of a command, while here it should add exactly one argument in a specific place, so I've used -n and -J arguments to arrange that. The more common usage would be something like
ls | xargs grep -- term
to search all of the files output by ls for term. Although of course if you just want files in the current directory, you can this more simply without a pipeline:
grep -- term *
and likewise in your reversed arrangement,
for filename in *; do
grep -- "$#" PathOfFileToBeSearched
done
There's one important xargs caveat: whitespace characters in the filenames generated by ls won't be handled too well. To do that, provided you have GNU utilities, you can use find instead.
find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 -J % grep -- % PathOfFileToBeSearched
to use NUL characters to separate filenames instead of whitespace

use of grep commands in unix

I have a file and i want to sort it according to a word and to remove the special characters.
The grep command is used to search for the characters
-b Display the block number at the beginning of each line.
-c Display the number of matched lines.
-h Display the matched lines, but do not display the filenames.
-i Ignore case sensitivity.
-l Display the filenames, but do not display the matched lines.
-n Display the matched lines and their line numbers.
-s Silent mode.
-v Display all lines that do NOT match.
-w Match whole word
but
How to use the grep command to do the file sort and remove the special character and number.
grep searches inside all the files to find matching text. It doesn't really sort and it doesn't really chop and change output. What you want is probably to use the sort command
sort <filename>
and the output sent to either the awk command or the sed command, which are common tools for manipulating text.
sort <filename> | sed 's/REPLACE/NEW_TEXT/g'
something like above I'd imagine.
The following command would do it.
sort FILE | tr -d 'LIST OF SPECIAL CHARS' > NEW_FILE

How do I perform a recursive directory search for strings within files in a UNIX TRU64 environment?

Unfortunately, due to the limitations of our Unix Tru64 environment, I am unable to use the GREP -r switch to perform my search for strings within files across multiple directories and sub directories.
Ideally, I would like to pass two parameters. The first will be the directory I want my search is to start on. The second is a file containing a list of all the strings to be searched. This list will consist of various directory path names and will include special characters:
ie:
/aaa/bbb/ccc
/eee/dddd/ggggggg/
etc..
The purpose of this exercise is to identify all shell scripts that may have specific hard coded path names identified in my list.
There was one example I found during my investigations that perhaps comes close, but I am not sure how to customize this to accept a file of string arguments:
eg: find etb -exec grep test {} \;
where 'etb' is the directory and 'test', a hard coded string to be searched.
This should do it:
find dir -type f -exec grep -F -f strings.txt {} \;
dir is the directory from which searching will commence
strings.txt is the file of strings to match, one per line
-F means treat search strings as literal rather than regular expressions
-f strings.txt means use the strings in strings.txt for matching
You can add -l to the grep switches if you just want filenames that match.
Footnote:
Some people prefer a solution involving xargs, e.g.
find dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -F -f strings.txt
which is perhaps a little more robust/efficient in some cases.
By reading, I assume we can not use the gnu coreutil, and egrep is not available.
I assume (for some reason) the system is broken, and escapes do not work as expected.
Under normal situations, grep -rf patternfile.txt /some/dir/ is the way to go.
a file containing a list of all the strings to be searched
Assumptions : gnu coreutil not available. grep -r does not work. handling of special character is broken.
Now, you have working awk ? no ?. It makes life so much easier. But lets be on the safe side.
Assume : working sed ,one of od OR hexdump OR xxd (from vim package) is available.
Lets call this patternfile.txt
1. Convert list into a regexp that grep likes
Example patternfile.txt contains
/foo/
/bar/doe/
/root/
(example does not print special char, but it's there.) we must turn it into something like
(/foo/|/bar/doe/|/root/)
Assuming echo -en command is not broken, and xxd , or od, or hexdump is available,
Using hexdump
cat patternfile.txt |hexdump -ve '1/1 "%02x \n"' |tr -d '\n'
Using od
cat patternfile.txt |od -A none -t x1|tr -d '\n'
and pipe it into (common for both hexdump and od)
|sed 's:[ ]*0a[ ]*$::g'|sed 's: 0a:\\|:g' |sed 's:^[ ]*::g'|sed 's:^: :g' |sed 's: :\\x:g'
then pipe result into
|sed 's:^:\\(:g' |sed 's:$:\\):g'
and you have a regexp pattern that is escaped.
2. Feed the escaped pattern into broken regexp
Assuming the bare minimum shell escape is available,
we use grep "$(echo -en "ESCAPED_PATTERN" )" to do our job.
3. To sum it up
Building a escaped regexp pattern (using hexdump as example )
grep "$(echo -en "$( cat patternfile.txt |hexdump -ve '1/1 "%02x \n"' |tr -d '\n' |sed 's:[ ]*0a[ ]*$::g'|sed 's: 0a:\\|:g' |sed 's:^[ ]*::g'|sed 's:^: :g' |sed 's: :\\x:g'|sed 's:^:\\(:g' |sed 's:$:\\):g')")"
will escape all characters and enclose it with (|) brackets so a regexp OR match will be performed.
4. Recrusive directory lookup
Under normal situations, even when grep -r is broken, find /dir/ -exec grep {} \; should work.
Some may prefer xargs instaed (unless you happen to have buggy xargs).
We prefer find /somedir/ -type f -print0 |xargs -0 grep -f 'patternfile.txt' approach, but since
this is not available (for whatever valid reason),
we need to exec grep for each file,and this is normaly the wrong way.
But lets do it.
Assume : find -type f works.
Assume : xargs is broken OR not available.
First, if you have a buggy pipe, it might not handle large number of files.
So we avoid xargs in such systems (i know, i know, just lets pretend it is broken ).
find /whatever/dir/to/start/looking/ -type f > list-of-all-file-to-search-for.txt
IF your shell handles large size lists nicely,
for file in cat list-of-all-file-to-search-for.txt ; do grep REGEXP_PATTERN "$file" ;
done ; is a nice way to get by. Unfortunetly, some systems do not like that,
and in that case, you may require
cat list-of-all-file-to-search-for.txt | split --help -a 4 -d -l 2000 file-smaller-chunk.part.
to turn it into smaller chunks. Now this is for a seriously broken system.
then a for file in file-smaller-chunk.part.* ; do for single_line in cat "$file" ; do grep REGEXP_PATTERN "$single_line" ; done ; done ;
should work.
A
cat filelist.txt |while read file ; do grep REGEXP_PATTERN $file ; done ;
may be used as workaround on some systems.
What if my shell doe not handle quotes ?
You may have to escape the file list beforehand.
It can be done much nicer in awk, perl, whatever, but since we restrict our selves to
sed, lets do it.
We assume 0x27, the ' code will actually work.
cat list-of-all-file-to-search-for.txt |sed 's#['\'']#'\''\\'\'\''#g'|sed 's:^:'\'':g'|sed 's:$:'\'':g'
The only time I had to use this was when feeding output into bash again.
What if my shell does not handle that ?
xargs fails , grep -r fails , shell's for loop fails.
Do we have other things ? YES.
Escape all input suitable for your shell, and make a script.
But you know what, I got board, and writing automated scripts for csh just seems
wrong. So I am going to stop here.
Take home note
Use the tool for the right job. Writing a interpreter on bc is perfectly
capable, but it is just plain wrong. Install coreutils, perl, a better grep
what ever. makes life a better thing.

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