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April 2022

Bash script tricks and recipes

There are a number of programming concepts that are important but hard to remember. This is a cheat-sheet type of document where you can just copy ideas to your own bash scripts.

Read STDIN line by line by looping over the data from STDIN:
while read l; do echo "this is one line: $l" done


Read a file line by line and assigning the value to a variable:
while read l; do echo "this is one line: $l" done < file.txt


Assign the output of a command to variables in an array (whitespace is the default field delimiter). You can think of this as a good way of assigning multiple variables at the same time:
arr=( `echo "1 two 3"` ) echo ${arr[0]} # prints 1 echo ${arr[1]} # prints two echo ${arr[2]} # prints 3 echo ${arr[@]} # prints all elements: 1 two 3 echo ${!arr[@]} # prints all available array indices: 0 1 2 echo ${#arr[@]} # prints array size: 3


Read data from myfile.txt and split out columns using awk. Assing the values located with awk to two variables (${arr[0]} and ${arr[1]}):
linenumber=0 while read oneline; do linenumber=`expr $linenumber "+" 1` arr=(`echo $oneline | awk '{print $2 " " $3}'`) echo "line $linenumber: second field in file=${arr[0]}, third=${arr[1]}" done < myfile.txt


Loop over the content of an array:
arr=( `echo "1 two 3"` ) for val in ${arr[@]}; do echo "value is: $val" done


Loop 2 to 10:
for i in {2..10}; do echo "$i" done

This will print the numbers from 2 to 10
Note: there is no space inside the "{ }".

Test if stdin is from the terminal or a pipe:
if [ -t 0 ]; then echo "interactive terminal" else echo "reading data from a pipe in stdin" fi


Get date and time in a nicely sortable format
today=`date "+%Y-%m-%d"` echo "date: $today" dt=`date "+%Y-%m-%d_%H%M%S"` echo "date and HourMinSec: $dt" dtzone=`date "+%Y-%m-%d_%H%M%S %Z"` echo "date and HourMinSec and timezone: $dtzone"


A complete bash script with help function and and an option parser:
#!/bin/bash help() { cat << EOH arg-parse-demo.sh -- a bash argument parser Usage: arg-parse-demo.sh [-h][-v][-a value] file1 [file2] OPTIONS: -h this help -v verbous flag -a this option takes an argument. Examples: arg-parse-demo.sh -h arg-parse-demo.sh -a hello firstfile secondfile EOH exit 0 } opt_v=0 # we make this numeric opt_a="" # an empty string # the arguments we accept are listed below. A colon after the arg means it takes a value: while getopts "a:hv" o; do case "${o}" in a) opt_a="$OPTARG" ;; h) help ;; v) opt_v=1 ;; \?) exit 1 # invalid option, getopts itself will print the error ;; esac done shift $((OPTIND-1)) # the $1 is now the first argument after all the options # $* is all the argumnets after the options echo "remaining commandline arguments: $*" if [ $opt_v -gt 0 ]; then echo "option -v was given" fi if [ -n "$opt_a" ]; then echo "option -a was given with value: $opt_a" fi # since this program expect at least one argument after all the options we call # help unless there is one argument left if [ -z "$1" ]; then help; fi


Loop over files given on the command even if they contain spaces (such as "file with space in filename.txt"):
for f in "$@" ; do echo "file size of: $f" du -hs "$f" done

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© 2004-2024 Guido Socher