Is there something similar to $1, but that gathers all input from the terminal input, including whitespace characters? This would be used to collect a pasted directory path that may have whitespaces - I need the whole string.
Thanks In Advance
Thankfully, I've received the answer to my first question. In execution, however, I can't get it to work. Here is my code. Can anyone explain what I'm doing wrong? Thanks.
alias finder='cd $* && open .'
It's returning segmented returns - every time it hits a space, it treats it as a separate entry.
Try $* or $#.
$* All of the positional parameters, seen as a single word
$# Same as $*, but each parameter is a quoted string, that is, the
parameters are passed on intact, without interpretation or expansion.
Normally you'd just refer to the first argument as "$1", including the quotation marks. If you want to use a directory name as an argument, and the name has spaces in it, you'd typically quote it on the command line:
alias finder='cd "$1" && open .'
...
finder "/some/dir/with spaces/in its name"
That also works well with tab completion, which escapes whitespace for you. And in this particular case, you probably might as well use the open command directly.
But if you want the finder alias to concatenate multiple arguments into a single string, separated by spaces, that actually turns out to be harder. I've tried some possibilities using $* and $#, but they don't work correctly. For testing, I'm using my own command echol, which prints each of its arguments on a separate line.
$ echol foo bar
foo
bar
$ alias e='echol "$*"'
$ e foo bar
foo
bar
$ alias e='eval echo \""$*"\"'
$ e foo bar
foo bar
That last one is the closest I've come, but it adds an extra leading space.
I think you're better off just quoting the directory name.
Related
What controls the environment to know to split by space in zsh?
I'm sure it's something simple but in all my searching have yet to figure it out what controls it.
Trying to loop over items in a space-separated string like so:
s='foo bar baz'
for i in $s; do
echo "$i END"
done
# foo bar baz END
# ---
s='foo bar baz'
a=( $s )
echo ${a[0]} # (empty)
echo ${a[1]} # foo bar baz
# ---
s='foo bar baz'
IFS=' ' read a <<< $s
for i in "${a[#]}"; do
echo "$i END"
done
# foo bar baz END
The different methods work via sh and bash, but in a shell with oh-my-zsh I'm unable to separate by space, getting the results above. May not be oh-my-zsh - but looking to understand what drives this.
Working example from bash:
s='foo bar baz'
for i in $s; do
echo "$i END"
done
# foo END
# bar END
# baz END
Zsh and bash are two different programming languages. They're similar, but not identical. In bash, and more generally in Bourne-style shells (sh, dash, ksh, …), an unquoted variable expansion $foo does the following:
Take the value of the variable foo, which is a string. (If there is no variable foo, take the empty string.)
Split the string into whitespace-separated parts. (More generally, the value of the IFS variable determines how the string is split; I won't go into all the details here.) The result is a list of strings.
For every element in the list, if it is a globbing pattern, i.e. if it contains at least one wildcard character *?\[ (and possibly more depending on some shell options), and that pattern matches at least one file name, then the element is replaced by the list of matching file names. Elements that don't contain any wildcard character, and elements that contain a wildcard character but don't match any file name, are left alone. The result is again a list of strings.
Zsh is mostly a Bourne-style shell, but it has some differences, and this is the main one: $foo has the following, simpler behavior.
Take the value of the variable foo, which is a string. (If there is no variable foo, take the empty string.)
If this results in an empty word, this word is eliminated. (So for example $foo$bar is only eliminated if both foo and bar are empty or unset.)
Note that in sh or bash, $foo only works to split a string if it doesn't contain any wildcard character or if globbing is disabled with set -f.
To split a string at whitespace in zsh, there are two simple methods:
Use the = parameter expansion specified to apply IFS word splitting. For example $=foo splits at whitespace as determined by IFS.
Use the p parameter expansion flag. For example ${(p: :)foo} splits at spaces (not tabs or newlines).
This has nothing to do with oh-my-zsh, which is a plugin to configure zsh for interactive use.
Just ${(p: :)foo} didn't work for me, and was giving a a zsh: error in flags error. After reading Parameter-Expansion doc, I see that it should be ${(ps: :)foo}. Even the flag p explanation in the doc uses the additional s flag.
The p flag doc says:
p :
Recognize the same escape sequences as the print builtin
in string arguments to any of the flags described below
that follow this argument.
So what I ended up using was just ${(s: :)foo}. See the example for the behavior where only space is used as the separator, contiguous spaces are treated as one, while tabs and newlines are preserved as is:
> FRUITS="apple\tbanana grapes orange passion_fruit\nwatermelon"
> for F in ${(ps: :)FRUITS}; do echo "GOT: <$F>"; done
GOT: <apple banana>
GOT: <grapes>
GOT: <orange>
GOT: <passion_fruit
watermelon>
We have requirement where i need to replace part of param value in our configuration file.
Example
key1=123-456
I need to replace the value after hyphen with new value.
I got command which is being used in other projects but i am not sure how it works.
Command
[test]$ cat test_sed_key_value.txt
key1=123-456
[test]$ sed -i -e '/key1/ s/-.*$/-789/' test_sed_key_value.txt
[test]$
[test]$ cat test_sed_key_value.txt
key1=123-789
[test]$
It will be helpful if some one can explain how the above command or is there a simpler way to do this using sed.
Here is a list of parts of that commandline, each followed by a short explanation:
sed
which tool to use
-i
flag: apply the effect directly to the processed file (whithout creating a copy of the input file)
-e
expression parameter: the sed code to apply follows
/key1/
"address": only process lines on which this regex applies, i.e. those containing the text "key1"
s/replacethis/withthis/
command: do a search-and-replace, "replacethis" and "withthis" are the next to explanations
-.*$
regex: (what is actually in the commandline instead of "replacethis") a regular expression representing a "minus" followed by anything, in any number, until the end of the line
-789
literal: (what is actually in the commandline instead of "withthis") simply that string "-789"
test_sed_key_value.txt
file parameter: process this file
I cannot think of any way to do this simpler. The shown command already uses some assumptions on the formatting of the input file.
I'd add to Yunnosch's answer that here the "replacethis" is a regexp:
-.*$
See here for an overview of the syntax of sed's regular expressions by Gnu.
Asterisk means a repetition of the previous thing, dot means any character, so .* means a sequence of characters.
$ is the end of the line.
You might want to be a bit more restrictive, since here you'd lose something in a line like this one for instance:
key1=123-456, key2=abc-def
replacing it by:
key1=123-789
removing completely the key2 part (since the .* takes all characters after the first dash until end of line).
So depending on the format of your values, you might prefer something like
-[0-9]*
(without the $), meaning a sequence of numbers after the -
or
-[0-9a-zA-Z_]
meaning a sequence of numbers or letters or underscore after the -
I'm trying to figure out how to get file completion to work at any word position on the command line after a set of characters. As listed in a shell these characters would be [ =+-\'\"()] (the whitespace is tab and space). Zsh will do this, but only after the backtick character, '`', or $(. mksh does this except not after the characters [+-].
By word position on the command line, I'm talking about each set of characters you type out which are delimited by space and a few other characters. For example,
print Hello World,
has three words at positions 1-3. At position 1, when you're first typing stuff in, completion is pretty much perfect. File completion works after all of the characters I mentioned. After the first word, the completion system gets more limited since it's smart. This is useful for commands, but limiting where you can do file completion isn't particularly helpful.
Here are some examples of where file completion doesn't work for me but should in my opinion:
: ${a:=/...}
echo "${a:-/...}"
make LDFLAGS+='-nostdlib /.../crt1.o /.../crti.o ...'
env a=/... b=/... ...
I've looked at rebinding '^I' (tab) with the handful of different completion widgets Zsh comes with and changing my zstyle ':completion:*' lines. Nothing has worked so far to change this default Zsh behaviour. I'm thinking I need to create a completion function that I can add to the end of my zstyle ':completion:*' completer ... line as a last resort completion.
In the completion function, one route would be to cut out the current word I want to complete, complete it, and then re-insert the completion back into the line if that's possible. It could also be more like _precommand which shifts the second word to the first word so that normal command completion works.
I was able to modify _precommand so that you can complete commands at any word position. This is the new file, I named it _commando and added its directory to my fpath:
#compdef -
# precommands is made local in _main_complete
precommands+=($words[1,$(( CURRENT -1 ))])
shift words
CURRENT=1
_normal
To use it I added it to the end of my ':completion:*' completer ... line in my zshrc so it works with every program in $path. Basically whatever word you're typing in is considered the first word, so command completion works at every word position on the command line.
I'm trying to figure out a way to do the same thing for file completion, but it looks a little more complicated at first glace. I'm not really sure where to go with this, so I'm looking to get some help on this.
I took a closer look at some of Zsh's builtin functions and noticed a few that have special completion behaviour. They belong to the typeset group, which has a function _typeset in the default fpath. I only needed to extract a few lines for what I wanted to do. These are the lines I extracted:
...
elif [[ "$PREFIX" = *\=* ]]; then
compstate[parameter]="${PREFIX%%\=*}"
compset -P 1 '*='
_value
...
These few lines allow typeset completion after each slash in a command like this:
typeset file1=/... file2=~/... file3=/...
I extrapolated from this to create the following function. You can modify it to put in your fpath. I just defined it in my zshrc like this:
_reallyforcefilecompletion() {
local prefix_char
for prefix_char in ' ' $'\t' '=' '+' '-' "'" '"' ')' ':'; do
if [[ "$PREFIX" = *${prefix_char}* ]]; then
if [[ "$PREFIX" = *[\'\"]* ]]; then
compset -q -P "*${prefix_char}"
else
compset -P "*${prefix_char}"
fi
_value
break
fi
done
}
You can use this by adding it to a zstyle line like this:
zstyle ':completion:*' completer _complete _reallyforcefilecompletion
This way, it's only used as a last resort so that smarter completions can try before it. Here's a little explanation of the function starting with the few variables and the command involved:
prefix_char: This gets set to each prefix character we want to complete after. For example, env a=123 has the prefix character =.
PREFIX: Initially this will be set to the part of the current word from the beginning of the word up to the position of the cursor; it may be altered to give a common prefix for all matches.
IPREFIX (not shown in code): compset moves string matches from PREFIX to IPREFIX so that the rest of PREFIX can be completed.
compset: This command simplifies modification of the special parameters, while its return status allows tests on them to be carried out.
_value: Not really sure about this one. The documentation states it plays some sort of role in completion.
Documentation for the completion system
The function: In the second line, we declare prefix_char local to avoid variable pollution. In line three, we start a for loop selecting each prefix_char we want to complete after. In the next if block, we check if the variable PREFIX ends with one of the prefix_chars we want to complete after and if PREFIX contains any quotes. Since PREFIX contains quotes, we use compset -q to basically allow quotes to be ignored so we can complete in them. compset -P strips PREFIX and moves it to IPREFIX, basically so it gets ignored and completion can work.
The next elif statement is for a PREFIX ending with prefix_char but not containing quotes, so we only use compset -P. I added the return 0 to break the loop. A more correct way to make this function would be in a case statement, but we're not using the compset return value, so this works. You don't see anything about file completion besides _value. For the most part we just told the system to ignore part of the word.
Basically this is what the function does. We have a line that looks like:
env TERM=linux PATH=/<---cursor here
The cursor is at the end of that slash. This function allows PREFIX, which is PATH=, to be ignored, so we have:
env TERM=linux /<---cursor here
You can complete a file there with PATH= removed. The function doesn't actually remove the PATH= though, it just recategorizes it as something to ignore.
With this function, you can now complete in all of the examples I listed in the question and a lot more.
One last thing to mention, adding this force-list line in your zshrc cripples this function somehow. It still works but seems to choke. This new force-list function is way better anyway.
zstyle ':completion:*' force-list always
EDIT: There were a couple lines I forgot to copy into the function. Probably should have checked before posting. I think it's good now.
zsh is great but its completion system is very diverse. And the documentation lacks good examples. Is there a template for completing for a specific application. The completion would get its match data from a file, separated by newlines?
I tried modifying an older example of mine that takes match data "live":
~ % cat .zsh/completers/_jazzup
#compdef jazz_up
_arguments "2: :(`mpc lsplaylists|sed -e 's# #\\\\ #g'`)"
I could supply cat my_file there instead of mpc invocation and so on but would there be a more elegant way to do this simple task? And that completion there is placement-specific: can you provide an example where zsh would attempt to complete at any point after the program name is recognized?
The match data will have whitespaces and so on, the completion should escape the WS. Example of that:
Foo bar
Barbaric
Get it (42)
Now if that completion would be configured for a command Say, we should get this kind of behaviour out of zsh:
$ Say Fo<TAB>
$ Say Foo\ bar
$ Say Ge<TAB>
$ Say Get\ it\ \(42\)
Simple completion needs are better addressed with _describe, it pairs an array holding completion options and a description for them (you can use multiple array/description pairs, check the manual).
(_arguments is great but too complex.)
[...]
First create a file
echo "foo\nbar\nbaz\nwith spac e s\noh:noes\noh\:yes" >! ~/simple-complete
Then create a file _simple somewhere in your $fpath:
#compdef simple
# you may wish to modify the expansion options here
# PS: 'f' is the flag making one entry per line
cmds=( ${(uf)"$(< ~/simple-complete)"} )
# main advantage here is that it is easy to understand, see alternative below
_describe 'a description of the completion options' cmds
# this is the equivalent _arguments command... too complex for what it does
## _arguments '*:foo:(${cmds})'
then
function simple() { echo $* }
autoload _simple # do not forget BEFORE the next cmd!
compdef _simple simple # binds the completion function to a command
simple [TAB]
it works. Just make sure the completion file _simple is placed somewhere in your fpath.
Notice that : in the option list is supposed to be used for separating an option from their (individual) description (oh:noes). So that won't work with _describe unless you quote it (oh\:yes). The commented out _arguments example will not use the : as a separator.
Without changing anything further in .zshrc (I already have autoload -Uz compinit
compinit) I added the following as /usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions/_drush
#compdef drush
_arguments "1: :($(/usr/local/bin/aliases-drush.php))"
Where /usr/local/bin/aliases-drush.php just prints a list of strings, each string being a potential first argument for the command drush. You could use ($(< filename)) to complete from filename.
I based this on https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/458850/9452 -- it's surprising how simple this is at the end of the day.
I have a simple thing to do, but I'm novice in UNIX.
So, I have a file and on each line I have an ID.
I need to go through the file and put all ID's into one variable.
I've tried something like in Java but does not work.
for variable in `cat myFile.txt`
do
param=`echo "${param} ${variable}"`
done
It does not seems to add all values into param.
Thanks.
I'd use:
param=$(<myFile.txt)
The parameter has white space (actually newlines) between the names. When used without quotes, the shell will expand those to spaces, as in:
cat $param
If used with quotes, the file names will remain on separate lines, as in:
echo "$param"
Note that the Korn shell special-cases the '$(<file)' notation and does not fork and execute any command.
Also note that your original idea can be made to work more simply:
param=
for variable in `cat myFile.txt`
do
param="${param} ${variable}"
done
This introduces a blank at the front of the parameter; it seldom matters. Interestingly, you can avoid the blank at the front by having one at the end, using param="${param}${variable} ". This also works without messing things up, though it looks as though it jams things together. Also, the '${var}' notation is not necessary, though it does no harm either.
And, finally for now, it is better to replace the back-tick command with '$(cat myFile.txt)'. The difference becomes crucial when you need to nest commands:
perllib=$(dirname $(dirname $(which perl)))/lib
vs
perllib=`dirname \`dirname \\\`which perl\\\`\``/lib
I know which I prefer to type (and read)!
Try this:
param=`cat myFile.txt | tr '\n' ' '`
The tr command translates all occurrences of \n (new line) to spaces. Then we assign the result to the param variable.
Lovely.
param="$(< myFile.txt)"
or
while read line
do
param="$param$line"$'\n'
done < myFile.txt
awk
var=$(awk '1' ORS=" " file)
ksh
while read -r line
do
t="$t $line"
done < file
echo $t