I'm pretty new to Linux and I've been trying some learning recently. One thing I'm struggling is Within a log file I would like to grep for all the unique IDs that exist and store them in an array.
The format of the ids are like so id=12345678,
I'm struggling though to get these in to an array. So far I've tried a range of things, the below however
a=($ (grep -HR1 `id=^[0-9]' logfile))
echo ${#a[#]}
but the echo count is always returned as 0. So it is clear the populating of the array is not working. Have explored other pages online, but nothing seems to have a clear explanation of what I am looking for exactly.
a=($(grep -Eow 'id=[0-9]+' logfile))
a=("${a[#]#id=}")
printf '%s\n' "${a[#]}"
It's safe to split an unquoted command substitution here, as we aren't printing pathname expansion characters (*?[]), or whitespace (other than the new lines which delimit the list).
If this were not the case, mapfile -t a <(grep ...) is a good alternative.
-E is extended regex (for +)
-o prints only matching text
-w matches a whole word only
${a[#]#id=} strips the id suffix from each array element
Here is an example
my_array=()
while IFS= read -r line; do
my_array+=( "$line" )
done < <( ls )
echo ${#my_array[#]}
printf '%s\n' "${my_array[#]}"
It prints out 14 and then the names of the 14 files in the same folder. Just substitute your command instead of ls and you started.
Suggesting readarray command to make sure it array reads full lines.
readarray -t my_array < <(grep -HR1 'id=^[0-9]' logfile)
printf "%s\n" "${my_array[#]}"
Related
I have the following find command with the following output:
$ find -name '*.jpg'
./public_html/github/screencasts-gh-pages/reactiveDataVis/presentation/images/telescope.jpg
./public_html/github/screencasts-gh-pages/introToBackbone/presentation/images/telescope.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/(6)Thin Ice.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/Snapshot.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/Map_Grass.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/(8)TheHunters.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/(2)Volcanis.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/(3)Trench wars.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/(8)BigGameHunters.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/(8)Turbo.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/(4)Blood Bath.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/(2)Switchback.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/Original/(6)Thin Ice.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/Original/Map_Grass.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/Original/(8)TheHunters.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/Original/(2)Volcanis.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/Original/(3)Trench wars.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/Original/(8)BigGameHunters.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/Original/(8)Turbo.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/Original/(4)Blood Bath.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/Original/(2)Switchback.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/Original/(4)Orbital Relay.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Maps/(4)Orbital Relay.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Bg/GameLose.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Bg/GameWin.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Bg/GameStart.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Bg/GamePlay.jpg
./public_html/github/StarCraft-master/img/Demo/Demo.jpg
./public_html/github/flot/examples/image/hs-2004-27-a-large-web.jpg
./public_html/github/minicourse-ajax-project/other/GameLose.jpg
How do I store this output in an array? I want it to handle filenames with spaces
I have tried this arrayname=($(find -name '*.jpg')) but this just stores the first element. # I am doing the following which seems to be just the first element?
$ arrayname=($(find -name '*.jpg'))
$ echo "$arrayname"
./public_html/github/screencasts-gh-pages/reactiveDataVis/presentation/images/telescope.jpg
$
I have tried here but again this just stores the 1st element
Other similar Qs
How do I capture the output from the ls or find command to store all file names in an array?
How do i store the output of a bash command in a variable?
If you know with certainty that your filenames will not contain newlines, then
mapfile -t arrayname < <(find ...)
If you want to be able to handle any file
arrayname=()
while IFS= read -d '' -r filename; do
arrayname+=("$filename")
done < <(find ... -print0)
echo "$arrayname" will only show the first element of the array. It is equivalent to echo "${arrayname[0]}". To dump an array:
printf "%s\n" "${arrayname[#]}"
# ............^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ must use exactly this form, with the quotes.
arrayname=($(find ...)) is still wrong. It will store the file ./file with spaces.txt as 3 separate elements in the array.
If you have a sufficiently recent version of bash, you can save yourself a lot of trouble by just using a ** glob.
shopt -s globstar
files=(**/*.jpg)
The first line enables the feature. Once enabled, ** in a glob pattern will match any number (including 0) of directories in the path.
Using the glob in the array definition makes sure that whitespace is handled correctly.
To view an array in a form which could be used to define the array, use the -p (print) option to the declare builtin:
declare -p files
A script takes a URL, parses it for the required fields, and redirects its output to be saved in a file, file.txt. The output is saved on a new line each time a field has been found.
file.txt
A Cat
A Dog
A Mouse
etc...
I want to take file.txt and create an array from it in a new script, where every line gets to be its own string variable in the array. So far I have tried:
#!/bin/bash
filename=file.txt
declare -a myArray
myArray=(`cat "$filename"`)
for (( i = 0 ; i < 9 ; i++))
do
echo "Element [$i]: ${myArray[$i]}"
done
When I run this script, whitespace results in words getting split and instead of getting
Desired output
Element [0]: A Cat
Element [1]: A Dog
etc...
I end up getting this:
Actual output
Element [0]: A
Element [1]: Cat
Element [2]: A
Element [3]: Dog
etc...
How can I adjust the loop below such that the entire string on each line will correspond one-to-one with each variable in the array?
Use the mapfile command:
mapfile -t myArray < file.txt
The error is using for -- the idiomatic way to loop over lines of a file is:
while IFS= read -r line; do echo ">>$line<<"; done < file.txt
See BashFAQ/005 for more details.
mapfile and readarray (which are synonymous) are available in Bash version 4 and above. If you have an older version of Bash, you can use a loop to read the file into an array:
arr=()
while IFS= read -r line; do
arr+=("$line")
done < file
In case the file has an incomplete (missing newline) last line, you could use this alternative:
arr=()
while IFS= read -r line || [[ "$line" ]]; do
arr+=("$line")
done < file
Related:
Need alternative to readarray/mapfile for script on older version of Bash
You can do this too:
oldIFS="$IFS"
IFS=$'\n' arr=($(<file))
IFS="$oldIFS"
echo "${arr[1]}" # It will print `A Dog`.
Note:
Filename expansion still occurs. For example, if there's a line with a literal * it will expand to all the files in current folder. So use it only if your file is free of this kind of scenario.
Use mapfile or read -a
Always check your code using shellcheck. It will often give you the correct answer. In this case SC2207 covers reading a file that either has space separated or newline separated values into an array.
Don't do this
array=( $(mycommand) )
Files with values separated by newlines
mapfile -t array < <(mycommand)
Files with values separated by spaces
IFS=" " read -r -a array <<< "$(mycommand)"
The shellcheck page will give you the rationale why this is considered best practice.
You can simply read each line from the file and assign it to an array.
#!/bin/bash
i=0
while read line
do
arr[$i]="$line"
i=$((i+1))
done < file.txt
This answer says to use
mapfile -t myArray < file.txt
I made a shim for mapfile if you want to use mapfile on bash < 4.x for whatever reason. It uses the existing mapfile command if you are on bash >= 4.x
Currently, only options -d and -t work. But that should be enough for that command above. I've only tested on macOS. On macOS Sierra 10.12.6, the system bash is 3.2.57(1)-release. So the shim can come in handy. You can also just update your bash with homebrew, build bash yourself, etc.
It uses this technique to set variables up one call stack.
Make sure set the Internal File Separator (IFS)
variable to $'\n' so that it does not put each word
into a new array entry.
#!/bin/bash
# move all 2020 - 2022 movies to /backup/movies
# put list into file 1 line per dir
# dirs are "movie name (year)/"
ls | egrep 202[0-2] > 2020_movies.txt
OLDIFS=${IFS}
IFS=$'\n' #fix separator
declare -a MOVIES # array for dir names
MOVIES=( $( cat "${1}" ) ) // load into array
for M in ${MOVIES[#]} ; do
echo "[${M}]"
if [ -d "${M}" ] ; then # if dir name
mv -v "$M" /backup/movies/
fi
done
IFS=${OLDIFS} # restore standard separators
# not essential as IFS reverts when script ends
#END
I am trying to save the result from find as arrays.
Here is my code:
#!/bin/bash
echo "input : "
read input
echo "searching file with this pattern '${input}' under present directory"
array=`find . -name ${input}`
len=${#array[*]}
echo "found : ${len}"
i=0
while [ $i -lt $len ]
do
echo ${array[$i]}
let i++
done
I get 2 .txt files under current directory.
So I expect '2' as result of ${len}. However, it prints 1.
The reason is that it takes all result of find as one elements.
How can I fix this?
P.S
I found several solutions on StackOverFlow about a similar problem. However, they are a little bit different so I can't apply in my case. I need to store the results in a variable before the loop. Thanks again.
Update 2020 for Linux Users:
If you have an up-to-date version of bash (4.4-alpha or better), as you probably do if you are on Linux, then you should be using Benjamin W.'s answer.
If you are on Mac OS, which —last I checked— still used bash 3.2, or are otherwise using an older bash, then continue on to the next section.
Answer for bash 4.3 or earlier
Here is one solution for getting the output of find into a bash array:
array=()
while IFS= read -r -d $'\0'; do
array+=("$REPLY")
done < <(find . -name "${input}" -print0)
This is tricky because, in general, file names can have spaces, new lines, and other script-hostile characters. The only way to use find and have the file names safely separated from each other is to use -print0 which prints the file names separated with a null character. This would not be much of an inconvenience if bash's readarray/mapfile functions supported null-separated strings but they don't. Bash's read does and that leads us to the loop above.
[This answer was originally written in 2014. If you have a recent version of bash, please see the update below.]
How it works
The first line creates an empty array: array=()
Every time that the read statement is executed, a null-separated file name is read from standard input. The -r option tells read to leave backslash characters alone. The -d $'\0' tells read that the input will be null-separated. Since we omit the name to read, the shell puts the input into the default name: REPLY.
The array+=("$REPLY") statement appends the new file name to the array array.
The final line combines redirection and command substitution to provide the output of find to the standard input of the while loop.
Why use process substitution?
If we didn't use process substitution, the loop could be written as:
array=()
find . -name "${input}" -print0 >tmpfile
while IFS= read -r -d $'\0'; do
array+=("$REPLY")
done <tmpfile
rm -f tmpfile
In the above the output of find is stored in a temporary file and that file is used as standard input to the while loop. The idea of process substitution is to make such temporary files unnecessary. So, instead of having the while loop get its stdin from tmpfile, we can have it get its stdin from <(find . -name ${input} -print0).
Process substitution is widely useful. In many places where a command wants to read from a file, you can specify process substitution, <(...), instead of a file name. There is an analogous form, >(...), that can be used in place of a file name where the command wants to write to the file.
Like arrays, process substitution is a feature of bash and other advanced shells. It is not part of the POSIX standard.
Alternative: lastpipe
If desired, lastpipe can be used instead of process substitution (hat tip: Caesar):
set +m
shopt -s lastpipe
array=()
find . -name "${input}" -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d $'\0'; do array+=("$REPLY"); done; declare -p array
shopt -s lastpipe tells bash to run the last command in the pipeline in the current shell (not the background). This way, the array remains in existence after the pipeline completes. Because lastpipe only takes effect if job control is turned off, we run set +m. (In a script, as opposed to the command line, job control is off by default.)
Additional notes
The following command creates a shell variable, not a shell array:
array=`find . -name "${input}"`
If you wanted to create an array, you would need to put parens around the output of find. So, naively, one could:
array=(`find . -name "${input}"`) # don't do this
The problem is that the shell performs word splitting on the results of find so that the elements of the array are not guaranteed to be what you want.
Update 2019
Starting with version 4.4-alpha, bash now supports a -d option so that the above loop is no longer necessary. Instead, one can use:
mapfile -d $'\0' array < <(find . -name "${input}" -print0)
For more information on this, please see (and upvote) Benjamin W.'s answer.
Bash 4.4 introduced a -d option to readarray/mapfile, so this can now be solved with
readarray -d '' array < <(find . -name "$input" -print0)
for a method that works with arbitrary filenames including blanks, newlines, and globbing characters. This requires that your find supports -print0, as for example GNU find does.
From the manual (omitting other options):
mapfile [-d delim] [array]
-d
The first character of delim is used to terminate each input line, rather than newline. If delim is the empty string, mapfile will terminate a line when it reads a NUL character.
And readarray is just a synonym of mapfile.
The following appears to work for both Bash and Z Shell on macOS.
#! /bin/sh
IFS=$'\n'
paths=($(find . -name "foo"))
unset IFS
printf "%s\n" "${paths[#]}"
If you are using bash 4 or later, you can replace your use of find with
shopt -s globstar nullglob
array=( **/*"$input"* )
The ** pattern enabled by globstar matches 0 or more directories, allowing the pattern to match to an arbitrary depth in the current directory. Without the nullglob option, the pattern (after parameter expansion) is treated literally, so with no matches you would have an array with a single string rather than an empty array.
Add the dotglob option to the first line as well if you want to traverse hidden directories (like .ssh) and match hidden files (like .bashrc) as well.
you can try something like
array=(`find . -type f | sort -r | head -2`) , and in order to print the array values , you can try something like echo "${array[*]}"
None of these solutions suited me because I didn't feel like learning readarray and mapfile. Here is what I came up with.
#!/bin/bash
echo "input : "
read input
echo "searching file with this pattern '${input}' under present directory"
# The only change is here. Append to array for each non-empty line.
array=()
while read line; do
[[ ! -z "$line" ]] && array+=("$line")
done; <<< $(find . -name ${input} -print)
len=${#array[#]}
echo "found : ${len}"
i=0
while [ $i -lt $len ]
do
echo ${array[$i]}
let i++
done
You could do like this:
#!/bin/bash
echo "input : "
read input
echo "searching file with this pattern '${input}' under present directory"
array=(`find . -name '*'${input}'*'`)
for i in "${array[#]}"
do :
echo $i
done
In bash, $(<any_shell_cmd>) helps to run a command and capture the output. Passing this to IFS with \n as delimiter helps to convert that to an array.
IFS='\n' read -r -a txt_files <<< $(find /path/to/dir -name "*.txt")
I have a text file which consists of say ..following information say test.text:
an
apple of
one's eye
I want to read these lines in an array using shell scripting by doing a cat test.text. I have tried using a=(`cat test.text`), but that doesn't work as it considers space as a delimiter. I need the values as a[0]=an , a[1]=apple of , a[2]=one's eye. I don't want to use IFS. Need help, thanks in advance..!!
In bash 4 or later
readarray a < test.text
This will include an empty element for each blank line, so you might want to remove the empty lines from the input file first.
In earlier versions, you'll need to build the array manually.
a=()
while read; do a+=("$REPLY"); done < test.text
One of various options you have is to use read with bash. Set IFS to the newline and line separator to NUL
IFS=$'\n' read -d $'\0' -a a < test.txt
Plain sh
IFS='
'
set -- $(< test.txt)
unset IFS
echo "$1"
echo "$2"
echo "$#"
bash
IFS=$'\n' a=($(< test.txt))
echo "${a[0]}"
echo "${a[1]}"
echo "${a[#]}"
I'm inclined to say these are the best of the available solutions because they do not involve looping.
Let's say:
cat file
an
apple of
one's eye
Use this while loop:
arr=()
while read -r l; do
[[ -n "$l" ]] && arr+=("$l")
done < file
TEST
set | grep arr
arr=([0]="an" [1]="apple of" [2]="one's eye")
This question already has answers here:
Creating an array from a text file in Bash
(7 answers)
Closed 7 years ago.
I am trying to read a file containing lines into a Bash array.
I have tried the following so far:
Attempt1
a=( $( cat /path/to/filename ) )
Attempt2
index=0
while read line ; do
MYARRAY[$index]="$line"
index=$(($index+1))
done < /path/to/filename
Both attempts only return a one element array containing the first line of the file. What am I doing wrong?
I am running bash 4.1.5
The readarray command (also spelled mapfile) was introduced in bash 4.0.
readarray -t a < /path/to/filename
Latest revision based on comment from BinaryZebra's comment
and tested here. The addition of command eval allows for the expression to be kept in the present execution environment while the expressions before are only held for the duration of the eval.
Use $IFS that has no spaces\tabs, just newlines/CR
$ IFS=$'\r\n' GLOBIGNORE='*' command eval 'XYZ=($(cat /etc/passwd))'
$ echo "${XYZ[5]}"
sync:x:5:0:sync:/sbin:/bin/sync
Also note that you may be setting the array just fine but reading it wrong - be sure to use both double-quotes "" and braces {} as in the example above
Edit:
Please note the many warnings about my answer in comments about possible glob expansion, specifically gniourf-gniourf's comments about my prior attempts to work around
With all those warnings in mind I'm still leaving this answer here (yes, bash 4 has been out for many years but I recall that some macs only 2/3 years old have pre-4 as default shell)
Other notes:
Can also follow drizzt's suggestion below and replace a forked subshell+cat with
$(</etc/passwd)
The other option I sometimes use is just set IFS into XIFS, then restore after. See also Sorpigal's answer which does not need to bother with this
The simplest way to read each line of a file into a bash array is this:
IFS=$'\n' read -d '' -r -a lines < /etc/passwd
Now just index in to the array lines to retrieve each line, e.g.
printf "line 1: %s\n" "${lines[0]}"
printf "line 5: %s\n" "${lines[4]}"
# all lines
echo "${lines[#]}"
One alternate way if file contains strings without spaces with 1string each line:
fileItemString=$(cat filename |tr "\n" " ")
fileItemArray=($fileItemString)
Check:
Print whole Array:
${fileItemArray[*]}
Length=${#fileItemArray[#]}
Your first attempt was close. Here is the simplistic approach using your idea.
file="somefileondisk"
lines=`cat $file`
for line in $lines; do
echo "$line"
done
#!/bin/bash
IFS=$'\n' read -d '' -r -a inlines < testinput
IFS=$'\n' read -d '' -r -a outlines < testoutput
counter=0
cat testinput | while read line;
do
echo "$((${inlines[$counter]}-${outlines[$counter]}))"
counter=$(($counter+1))
done
# OR Do like this
counter=0
readarray a < testinput
readarray b < testoutput
cat testinput | while read myline;
do
echo value is: $((${a[$counter]}-${b[$counter]}))
counter=$(($counter+1))
done