The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘bash’ Category

linux – How do I use sudo to redirect output to a location I don’t have permission to write to? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/07/09

Various ways are explained at [WayBack] linux – How do I use sudo to redirect output to a location I don’t have permission to write to? – Stack Overflow.

Some are for simple commands and can be a one liner (for instance using tee, or executing a secondary shell).

Others are more suited for longer command sequences.

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

How to return a string value from a Bash function – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/06/17

Cool: you can return strings both as a function result, and by reference: they are explained in the question, second and fourth answer of [WayBack] How to return a string value from a Bash function – Stack Overflow.

Returning them by reference has two important benefits:

  1. it is much faster (especially useful in tight loop)
  2. you can use echo (normally used to return a result) for debugging purposes

I also needed a bit of switch magic which I found at [WayBack] bash – Switch case with fallthrough? – Stack Overflow and array magic (from [WayBack] Array variables) as arrays are far more readable than indirection (on the why not, see [WayBack] BashFAQ/006 – Greg’s Wiki: How can I use variable variables (indirect variables, pointers, references) or associative arrays?).

So here is a function that returns a specific IPv4 octet.

function getIpv4Octet() {
  IPv4=$1
  octetIndex=$2
  outputVariable=$3

  slice="${IPv4}"
  count=1
  while [ "${count}" -le 4 ]
  do
    octet[${count}]="${slice%%.*}"
    slice="${slice#*.}"
    count=$((count+1))
  done
   
  case "${octetIndex}" in
    "1" | "2" | "3" | "4")
      ;;
    *)
      octetIndex="4"
      ;;
  esac
  eval $outputVariable="${octet[$octetIndex]}"
}

You call it like this:

$ getIpv4Octet "192.168.178.32" 3 result && echo ${result}
178

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

how to count the length of an array defined in bash? – Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/06/16

I needed to enumerate all the parameters to a function and access many of them by index in the same function, so thanks to both these:

I got at this:

  declare -a arguments=("$@")
  for index in ${!arguments[@]}; do
    echo $index/${#arguments[@]}:${arguments[$index]}
  done

These are all forms of Array handling or Shell Parameter Expansion with special cases for array variables:

  • ! does indirection, in this case from the array to the index of the array
  • # gets the lengt of the parameter (for arrays: the number of elements)
  • [] acccesse an array variable using an index

Via:

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

One day I will dig in the various ways that bash can do evaluation, for now: there is eval, “ and $() and I’m not sure when to choose which.

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/06/10

A while ago, I had to execute a series of aliases of which the names were stored in an array. A simple for loop with en eval call did the job.

Then I found out there are at least two more ways of evaluation in bash, so here are just a few links giving me a head start if I ever dig this up again:

Note that looping over parameters is different than over an array: [WayBack] Loop through an array of strings in Bash? – Stack Overflow

ou can use it like this:

## declare an array variable
declare -a arr=("element1" "element2" "element3")

## now loop through the above array
for i in "${arr[@]}"
do
   echo "$i"
   # or do whatever with individual element of the array
done

# You can access them using echo "${arr[0]}", "${arr[1]}" also

Also works for multi-line array declaration

declare -a arr=("element1" 
                "element2" "element3"
                "element4"
                )

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

bash + sed: quadruple backslash for proper escaping within an alias

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/06/09

This is part of a bash alias where I had to use quadruple backslash in order to escape it for sed:

# The sed with quad //// is to prevent 'unterminated substitute in regular expression':
alias x='... | sed "s/=.*/ \\\\/"'

This is needed because bash will escape \\\\ into \\ which sed then escapes to \.

The easiest way to find this is to replace the sed with echo to see the expansion.

References:

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, Development, Power User, Scripting, sed, Software Development | 2 Comments »

Cursor Movement in bash: either echo escape sequences or use tput

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/06/03

I read [WayBackCursor Movement earlier than [WayBack] Colours and Cursor Movement With tput and [WayBack] The Floating Clock Prompt.

So in one of my scripts I’ve now used an escape sequence, but I might change it to tput in a future version:

## Move one line up, then write finished scripts:
echo -e "\033[1A$finished\r"

I would probably have started with put if I had read [WayBack] bash – Set or change vertical position of the cursor – Stack Overflow first.

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

How do I delete a Bash function? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/06/02

I hardly do this, so I tend to forget that unset -f functionname deletes a function and unset variablename or unset -v variablename deletes a variable.

From:

I have done this:bash $ z() { echo ‘hello world’; }How do I get rid of it?

Source: [WayBackHow do I delete a Bash function? – Stack Overflow

Reference: [WayBack] unset Man Page – Bash – SS64.com

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

David Korn Tells All – Slashdot

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/05/21

Almost 20 years old, but still a very nice read [Archive.is] David Korn Tells All – Slashdot.

Another funny story involving David Korn during the not-so open source times of Microsoft late last century: [WayBack] Korn Shell Story

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, Development, History, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Bash Notes for Professionals book

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/05/12

For my reading list: Bash Notes for Professionals book

Download: [WayBack]  BashNotesForProfessionals.pdf

Via: [WayBack] Bash Notes for Professionals – a book compiled from Stack Overflow Documentation released under Creative Commons BY-SA  – ThisIsWhyICode – Google+

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Use the Unofficial Bash Strict Mode (Unless You Looove Debugging)

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/04/22

[WayBack] Use the Unofficial Bash Strict Mode (Unless You Looove Debugging):

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail
IFS=$'\n\t'

Explanation in the above post.

–jeroen

Posted in bash, Development, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »