I want to find all lines in several files that match one of two patterns. I tried to find the patterns I'm looking for by typing
grep (foo|bar) *.txt
but the shell interprets the | as a pipe and complains when bar isn't an executable.
How can I…
How do you remove a file whose filename begins with a dash (hyphen or minus) -? I'm ssh'd into a remote OSX server and I have this file in my directory:
tohru:~ $ ls -l
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 me staff 1352 Aug 18 14:33 --help
...
How in the…
Take the following script:
#!/bin/sh
sed 's/(127\.0\.1\.1)\s/\1/' [some file]
If I try to run this in sh (dash here), it'll fail because of the parentheses, which need to be escaped. But I don't need to escape the backslashes themselves (between…
… or an introductory guide to robust filename handling and other string passing in shell scripts.
I wrote a shell script which works well most of the time. But it chokes on some inputs (e.g. on some file names).
I encountered a problem such as the…
If you've been following unix.stackexchange.com for a while, you
should hopefully know by now that leaving a variable
unquoted in list context (as in echo $var) in Bourne/POSIX
shells (zsh being the exception) has a very special meaning…
I came across the following command:
sudo chown `id -u` /somedir
and I wonder: what is the meaning of the ` symbol. I noticed for instance that while the command above works well, the one below does not:
sudo chown 'id -u' /somedir
I just noticed that on one of my machines (running Debian Sid) whenever I type ls any file name with spaces has single quotes surrounding it.
I immediately checked my aliases, only to find them intact.
wyatt@debian630:~/testdir$ ls
'test 1.txt' …
I want to create a log file for a cron script that has the current hour in the log file name. This is the command I tried to use:
0 * * * * echo hello >> ~/cron-logs/hourly/test`date "+%d"`.log
Unfortunately I get this message when that…
I can write
VAR=$VAR1
VAR=${VAR1}
VAR="$VAR1"
VAR="${VAR1}"
the end result to me all seems about the same. Why should I write one or the other? are any of these not portable/POSIX?
In my Bash environment I use variables containing spaces, and I use these variables within command substitution.
What is the correct way to quote my variables? And how should I do it if these are nested?
DIRNAME=$(dirname "$FILE")
or do I quote…
I'm trying to use the curl command to access a http url with a exclamation mark (!) in its path. e.g:
curl -v "http://example.org/!287s87asdjh2/somepath/someresource"
the console replies with bash: ... event not found.
What is going on here? and…
The old advice used to be to double-quote any expression involving a $VARIABLE, at least if one wanted it to be interpreted by the shell as one single item, otherwise, any spaces in the content of $VARIABLE would throw off the shell.
I understand,…
$ ls -l /tmp/test/my\ dir/
total 0
I was wondering why the following ways to run the above command fail or succeed?
$ abc='ls -l "/tmp/test/my dir"'
$ $abc
ls: cannot access '"/tmp/test/my': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access 'dir"': No…
I'm having trouble with escaping characters in bash. I'd like to escape single and double quotes while running a command under a different user. For the purposes of this question let's say I want to echo the following on the screen:
'single quote…
