dynamic editing in linux

dynamic editing in linux - grep

I am fairly new to linux. What I am looking for is a way to edit a file without opening it, but by just editing grep output.
So if I do
grep find_me allMyfiles
and get the output
file_1: this is find_me line in file_1
file_2: this is find_me line in file_2
I would like to edit a certain line without having to open the file, so e.g. changing the first hit to
file_1: this is find_me line in file_1 including my edits
and having this change being saved in file_1

You did not define what "opening a file" means to you.
But something needs to do the open(2) syscall. (There is not way to read inside a file without using that open(2) syscall).
If you want to edit some file programmatically (inside your shell script), consider using the GNU ed, or GNU sed or GNU emacs (with emacs --batch or emacs --eval ....)
Perhaps GNU awk could be useful.
Reading Advanced Linux Programming and Advanced Bash Scripting should be helpful.

Use sed:
sed -i.bak '/find_me/s/$/ including my edits/' filename

Related

Why my rsync scripts do no work on the new mac? [duplicate]

I am making an NW.js app on macOS, and want to run the app in dev mode
by double-clicking on an icon.
In the first step, I'm trying to make my shell script work.
Using VS Code on Windows (I wanted to gain time), I have created a run-nw file at the root of my project, containing this:
#!/bin/bash
cd "src"
npm install
cd ..
./tools/nwjs-sdk-v0.17.3-osx-x64/nwjs.app/Contents/MacOS/nwjs "src" &
but I get this output:
$ sh ./run-nw
: command not found
: No such file or directory
: command not found
: No such file or directory
Usage: npm <command>
where <command> is one of: (snip commands list)
(snip npm help)
npm#3.10.3 /usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm
: command not found
: No such file or directory
: command not found
Some things I don't understand.
It seems that it takes empty lines as commands.
In my editor (VS Code) I have tried to replace \r\n with \n
(in case the \r creates problems) but it changes nothing.
It seems that it doesn't find the folders
(with or without the dirname instruction),
or maybe it doesn't know about the cd command ?
It seems that it doesn't understand the install argument to npm.
The part that really weirds me out, is that it still runs the app
(if I did an npm install manually)...
Not able to make it work properly, and suspecting something weird with
the file itself, I created a new one directly on the Mac, using vim this time.
I entered the exact same instructions, and... now it works without any
issues.
A diff on the two files reveals exactly zero difference.
What can be the difference? What can make the first script not work? How can I find out?
Update
Following the accepted answer's recommendations, after the wrong line
endings came back, I checked multiple things.
It turns out that since I copied my ~/.gitconfig from my Windows
machine, I had autocrlf=true, so every time I modified the bash
file under Windows, it re-set the line endings to \r\n.
So, in addition to running dos2unix (which you will have to
install using Homebrew on a Mac), if you're using Git, check your
.gitconfig file.

Yes. Bash scripts are sensitive to line-endings, both in the script itself and in data it processes. They should have Unix-style line-endings, i.e., each line is terminated with a Line Feed character (decimal 10, hex 0A in ASCII).
DOS/Windows line endings in the script
With Windows or DOS-style line endings , each line is terminated with a Carriage Return followed by a Line Feed character. You can see this otherwise invisible character in the output of cat -v yourfile:
$ cat -v yourfile
#!/bin/bash^M
^M
cd "src"^M
npm install^M
^M
cd ..^M
./tools/nwjs-sdk-v0.17.3-osx-x64/nwjs.app/Contents/MacOS/nwjs "src" &^M
In this case, the carriage return (^M in caret notation or \r in C escape notation) is not treated as whitespace. Bash interprets the first line after the shebang (consisting of a single carriage return character) as the name of a command/program to run.
Since there is no command named ^M, it prints : command not found
Since there is no directory named "src"^M (or src^M), it prints : No such file or directory
It passes install^M instead of install as an argument to npm which causes npm to complain.
DOS/Windows line endings in input data
Like above, if you have an input file with carriage returns:
hello^M
world^M
then it will look completely normal in editors and when writing it to screen, but tools may produce strange results. For example, grep will fail to find lines that are obviously there:
$ grep 'hello$' file.txt || grep -x "hello" file.txt
(no match because the line actually ends in ^M)
Appended text will instead overwrite the line because the carriage returns moves the cursor to the start of the line:
$ sed -e 's/$/!/' file.txt
!ello
!orld
String comparison will seem to fail, even though strings appear to be the same when writing to screen:
$ a="hello"; read b < file.txt
$ if [[ "$a" = "$b" ]]
then echo "Variables are equal."
else echo "Sorry, $a is not equal to $b"
fi
Sorry, hello is not equal to hello
Solutions
The solution is to convert the file to use Unix-style line endings. There are a number of ways this can be accomplished:
This can be done using the dos2unix program:
dos2unix filename
Open the file in a capable text editor (Sublime, Notepad++, not Notepad) and configure it to save files with Unix line endings, e.g., with Vim, run the following command before (re)saving:
:set fileformat=unix
If you have a version of the sed utility that supports the -i or --in-place option, e.g., GNU sed, you could run the following command to strip trailing carriage returns:
sed -i 's/\r$//' filename
With other versions of sed, you could use output redirection to write to a new file. Be sure to use a different filename for the redirection target (it can be renamed later).
sed 's/\r$//' filename > filename.unix
Similarly, the tr translation filter can be used to delete unwanted characters from its input:
tr -d '\r' <filename >filename.unix
Cygwin Bash
With the Bash port for Cygwin, there’s a custom igncr option that can be set to ignore the Carriage Return in line endings (presumably because many of its users use native Windows programs to edit their text files).
This can be enabled for the current shell by running set -o igncr.
Setting this option applies only to the current shell process so it can be useful when sourcing files with extraneous carriage returns. If you regularly encounter shell scripts with DOS line endings and want this option to be set permanently, you could set an environment variable called SHELLOPTS (all capital letters) to include igncr. This environment variable is used by Bash to set shell options when it starts (before reading any startup files).
Useful utilities
The file utility is useful for quickly seeing which line endings are used in a text file. Here’s what it prints for for each file type:
Unix line endings: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable
Mac line endings: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable, with CR line terminators
DOS line endings: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable, with CRLF line terminators
The GNU version of the cat utility has a -v, --show-nonprinting option that displays non-printing characters.
The dos2unix utility is specifically written for converting text files between Unix, Mac and DOS line endings.
Useful links
Wikipedia has an excellent article covering the many different ways of marking the end of a line of text, the history of such encodings and how newlines are treated in different operating systems, programming languages and Internet protocols (e.g., FTP).
Files with classic Mac OS line endings
With Classic Mac OS (pre-OS X), each line was terminated with a Carriage Return (decimal 13, hex 0D in ASCII). If a script file was saved with such line endings, Bash would only see one long line like so:
#!/bin/bash^M^Mcd "src"^Mnpm install^M^Mcd ..^M./tools/nwjs-sdk-v0.17.3-osx-x64/nwjs.app/Contents/MacOS/nwjs "src" &^M
Since this single long line begins with an octothorpe (#), Bash treats the line (and the whole file) as a single comment.
Note: In 2001, Apple launched Mac OS X which was based on the BSD-derived NeXTSTEP operating system. As a result, OS X also uses Unix-style LF-only line endings and since then, text files terminated with a CR have become extremely rare. Nevertheless, I think it’s worthwhile to show how Bash would attempt to interpret such files.

On JetBrains products (PyCharm, PHPStorm, IDEA, etc.), you'll need to click on CRLF/LF to toggle between the two types of line separators (\r\n and \n).

I was trying to startup my docker container from Windows and got this:
Bash script and /bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
I was using git bash and the problem was about the git config, then I just did the steps below and it worked. It will configure Git to not convert line endings on checkout:
git config --global core.autocrlf input
delete your local repository
clone it again.
Many thanks to Jason Harmon in this link:
https://forums.docker.com/t/error-while-running-docker-code-in-powershell/34059/6
Before that, I tried this, that didn't works:
dos2unix scriptname.sh
sed -i -e 's/\r$//' scriptname.sh
sed -i -e 's/^M$//' scriptname.sh

If you're using the read command to read from a file (or pipe) that is (or might be) in DOS/Windows format, you can take advantage of the fact that read will trim whitespace from the beginning and ends of lines. If you tell it that carriage returns are whitespace (by adding them to the IFS variable), it'll trim them from the ends of lines.
In bash (or zsh or ksh), that means you'd replace this standard idiom:
IFS= read -r somevar # This will not trim CR
with this:
IFS=$'\r' read -r somevar # This *will* trim CR
(Note: the -r option isn't related to this, it's just usually a good idea to avoid mangling backslashes.)
If you're not using the IFS= prefix (e.g. because you want to split the data into fields), then you'd replace this:
read -r field1 field2 ... # This will not trim CR
with this:
IFS=$' \t\n\r' read -r field1 field2 ... # This *will* trim CR
If you're using a shell that doesn't support the $'...' quoting mode (e.g. dash, the default /bin/sh on some Linux distros), or your script even might be run with such a shell, then you need to get a little more complex:
cr="$(printf '\r')"
IFS="$cr" read -r somevar # Read trimming *only* CR
IFS="$IFS$cr" read -r field1 field2 ... # Read trimming CR and whitespace, and splitting fields
Note that normally, when you change IFS, you should put it back to normal as soon as possible to avoid weird side effects; but in all these cases, it's a prefix to the read command, so it only affects that one command and doesn't have to be reset afterward.

Coming from a duplicate, if the problem is that you have files whose names contain ^M at the end, you can rename them with
for f in *$'\r'; do
mv "$f" "${f%$'\r'}"
done
You properly want to fix whatever caused these files to have broken names in the first place (probably a script which created them should be dos2unixed and then rerun?) but sometimes this is not feasible.
The $'\r' syntax is Bash-specific; if you have a different shell, maybe you need to use some other notation. Perhaps see also Difference between sh and bash

Since VS Code is being used, we can see CRLF or LF in the bottom right depending on what's being used and if we click on it we can change between them (LF is being used in below example):
We can also use the "Change End of Line Sequence" command from the command pallet. Whatever's easier to remember since they're functionally the same.

One more way to get rid of the unwanted CR ('\r') character is to run the tr command, for example:
$ tr -d '\r' < dosScript.py > nixScript.py

I ran into this issue when I use git with WSL.
git has a feature where it changes the line-ending of files according to the OS you are using, on Windows it make sure the line endings are \r\n which is not compatible with Linux which uses only \n.
You can resolve this problem by adding a file name .gitattributes to your git root directory and add lines as following:
config/* text eol=lf
run.sh text eol=lf
In this example all files inside config directory will have only line-feed line ending and run.sh file as well.

For Notepad++ users, this can be solved by:

The simplest way on MAC / Linux - create a file using 'touch' command, open this file with VI or VIM editor, paste your code and save. This would automatically remove the windows characters.

If you are using a text editor like BBEdit you can do it at the status bar. There is a selection where you can switch.

For IntelliJ users, here is the solution for writing Linux script.
Use LF - Unix and masOS (\n)

Scripts may call each other.
An even better magic solution is to convert all scripts in the folder/subfolders:
find . -name "*.sh" -exec sed -i -e 's/\r$//' {} +
You can use dos2unix too but many servers do not have it installed by default.

For the sake of completeness, I'll point out another solution which can solve this problem permanently without the need to run dos2unix all the time:
sudo ln -s /bin/bash `printf 'bash\r'`

GNU join overwriting output columns [duplicate]

Yes. Bash scripts are sensitive to line-endings, both in the script itself and in data it processes. They should have Unix-style line-endings, i.e., each line is terminated with a Line Feed character (decimal 10, hex 0A in ASCII).
DOS/Windows line endings in the script
With Windows or DOS-style line endings , each line is terminated with a Carriage Return followed by a Line Feed character. You can see this otherwise invisible character in the output of cat -v yourfile:
$ cat -v yourfile
#!/bin/bash^M
^M
cd "src"^M
npm install^M
^M
cd ..^M
./tools/nwjs-sdk-v0.17.3-osx-x64/nwjs.app/Contents/MacOS/nwjs "src" &^M
In this case, the carriage return (^M in caret notation or \r in C escape notation) is not treated as whitespace. Bash interprets the first line after the shebang (consisting of a single carriage return character) as the name of a command/program to run.
Since there is no command named ^M, it prints : command not found
Since there is no directory named "src"^M (or src^M), it prints : No such file or directory
It passes install^M instead of install as an argument to npm which causes npm to complain.
DOS/Windows line endings in input data
Like above, if you have an input file with carriage returns:
hello^M
world^M
then it will look completely normal in editors and when writing it to screen, but tools may produce strange results. For example, grep will fail to find lines that are obviously there:
$ grep 'hello$' file.txt || grep -x "hello" file.txt
(no match because the line actually ends in ^M)
Appended text will instead overwrite the line because the carriage returns moves the cursor to the start of the line:
$ sed -e 's/$/!/' file.txt
!ello
!orld
String comparison will seem to fail, even though strings appear to be the same when writing to screen:
$ a="hello"; read b < file.txt
$ if [[ "$a" = "$b" ]]
then echo "Variables are equal."
else echo "Sorry, $a is not equal to $b"
fi
Sorry, hello is not equal to hello
Solutions
The solution is to convert the file to use Unix-style line endings. There are a number of ways this can be accomplished:
This can be done using the dos2unix program:
dos2unix filename
Open the file in a capable text editor (Sublime, Notepad++, not Notepad) and configure it to save files with Unix line endings, e.g., with Vim, run the following command before (re)saving:
:set fileformat=unix
If you have a version of the sed utility that supports the -i or --in-place option, e.g., GNU sed, you could run the following command to strip trailing carriage returns:
sed -i 's/\r$//' filename
With other versions of sed, you could use output redirection to write to a new file. Be sure to use a different filename for the redirection target (it can be renamed later).
sed 's/\r$//' filename > filename.unix
Similarly, the tr translation filter can be used to delete unwanted characters from its input:
tr -d '\r' <filename >filename.unix
Cygwin Bash
With the Bash port for Cygwin, there’s a custom igncr option that can be set to ignore the Carriage Return in line endings (presumably because many of its users use native Windows programs to edit their text files).
This can be enabled for the current shell by running set -o igncr.
Setting this option applies only to the current shell process so it can be useful when sourcing files with extraneous carriage returns. If you regularly encounter shell scripts with DOS line endings and want this option to be set permanently, you could set an environment variable called SHELLOPTS (all capital letters) to include igncr. This environment variable is used by Bash to set shell options when it starts (before reading any startup files).
Useful utilities
The file utility is useful for quickly seeing which line endings are used in a text file. Here’s what it prints for for each file type:
Unix line endings: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable
Mac line endings: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable, with CR line terminators
DOS line endings: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable, with CRLF line terminators
The GNU version of the cat utility has a -v, --show-nonprinting option that displays non-printing characters.
The dos2unix utility is specifically written for converting text files between Unix, Mac and DOS line endings.
Useful links
Wikipedia has an excellent article covering the many different ways of marking the end of a line of text, the history of such encodings and how newlines are treated in different operating systems, programming languages and Internet protocols (e.g., FTP).
Files with classic Mac OS line endings
With Classic Mac OS (pre-OS X), each line was terminated with a Carriage Return (decimal 13, hex 0D in ASCII). If a script file was saved with such line endings, Bash would only see one long line like so:
#!/bin/bash^M^Mcd "src"^Mnpm install^M^Mcd ..^M./tools/nwjs-sdk-v0.17.3-osx-x64/nwjs.app/Contents/MacOS/nwjs "src" &^M
Since this single long line begins with an octothorpe (#), Bash treats the line (and the whole file) as a single comment.
Note: In 2001, Apple launched Mac OS X which was based on the BSD-derived NeXTSTEP operating system. As a result, OS X also uses Unix-style LF-only line endings and since then, text files terminated with a CR have become extremely rare. Nevertheless, I think it’s worthwhile to show how Bash would attempt to interpret such files.

On JetBrains products (PyCharm, PHPStorm, IDEA, etc.), you'll need to click on CRLF/LF to toggle between the two types of line separators (\r\n and \n).

I was trying to startup my docker container from Windows and got this:
Bash script and /bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
I was using git bash and the problem was about the git config, then I just did the steps below and it worked. It will configure Git to not convert line endings on checkout:
git config --global core.autocrlf input
delete your local repository
clone it again.
Many thanks to Jason Harmon in this link:
https://forums.docker.com/t/error-while-running-docker-code-in-powershell/34059/6
Before that, I tried this, that didn't works:
dos2unix scriptname.sh
sed -i -e 's/\r$//' scriptname.sh
sed -i -e 's/^M$//' scriptname.sh

If you're using the read command to read from a file (or pipe) that is (or might be) in DOS/Windows format, you can take advantage of the fact that read will trim whitespace from the beginning and ends of lines. If you tell it that carriage returns are whitespace (by adding them to the IFS variable), it'll trim them from the ends of lines.
In bash (or zsh or ksh), that means you'd replace this standard idiom:
IFS= read -r somevar # This will not trim CR
with this:
IFS=$'\r' read -r somevar # This *will* trim CR
(Note: the -r option isn't related to this, it's just usually a good idea to avoid mangling backslashes.)
If you're not using the IFS= prefix (e.g. because you want to split the data into fields), then you'd replace this:
read -r field1 field2 ... # This will not trim CR
with this:
IFS=$' \t\n\r' read -r field1 field2 ... # This *will* trim CR
If you're using a shell that doesn't support the $'...' quoting mode (e.g. dash, the default /bin/sh on some Linux distros), or your script even might be run with such a shell, then you need to get a little more complex:
cr="$(printf '\r')"
IFS="$cr" read -r somevar # Read trimming *only* CR
IFS="$IFS$cr" read -r field1 field2 ... # Read trimming CR and whitespace, and splitting fields
Note that normally, when you change IFS, you should put it back to normal as soon as possible to avoid weird side effects; but in all these cases, it's a prefix to the read command, so it only affects that one command and doesn't have to be reset afterward.

Coming from a duplicate, if the problem is that you have files whose names contain ^M at the end, you can rename them with
for f in *$'\r'; do
mv "$f" "${f%$'\r'}"
done
You properly want to fix whatever caused these files to have broken names in the first place (probably a script which created them should be dos2unixed and then rerun?) but sometimes this is not feasible.
The $'\r' syntax is Bash-specific; if you have a different shell, maybe you need to use some other notation. Perhaps see also Difference between sh and bash

Since VS Code is being used, we can see CRLF or LF in the bottom right depending on what's being used and if we click on it we can change between them (LF is being used in below example):
We can also use the "Change End of Line Sequence" command from the command pallet. Whatever's easier to remember since they're functionally the same.

One more way to get rid of the unwanted CR ('\r') character is to run the tr command, for example:
$ tr -d '\r' < dosScript.py > nixScript.py

I ran into this issue when I use git with WSL.
git has a feature where it changes the line-ending of files according to the OS you are using, on Windows it make sure the line endings are \r\n which is not compatible with Linux which uses only \n.
You can resolve this problem by adding a file name .gitattributes to your git root directory and add lines as following:
config/* text eol=lf
run.sh text eol=lf
In this example all files inside config directory will have only line-feed line ending and run.sh file as well.

For Notepad++ users, this can be solved by:

The simplest way on MAC / Linux - create a file using 'touch' command, open this file with VI or VIM editor, paste your code and save. This would automatically remove the windows characters.

If you are using a text editor like BBEdit you can do it at the status bar. There is a selection where you can switch.

For IntelliJ users, here is the solution for writing Linux script.
Use LF - Unix and masOS (\n)

Scripts may call each other.
An even better magic solution is to convert all scripts in the folder/subfolders:
find . -name "*.sh" -exec sed -i -e 's/\r$//' {} +
You can use dos2unix too but many servers do not have it installed by default.

For the sake of completeness, I'll point out another solution which can solve this problem permanently without the need to run dos2unix all the time:
sudo ln -s /bin/bash `printf 'bash\r'`

Grep returns no such file or directory when using multiple flags

I am a beginner of bash script. I just started to write a script where it checks the contents of b.txt can all be found in a.txt. (line by line preferably). My code is as following:
grep -Ffw b.txt a.txt
As you can see, I want to do fixed string instead of REGEX, I want to check everything from the b.txt file, because there are some strings inside the b.txt and I want to check if all of them exist in a.txt. And I also want to match the whole word only of course. So these are the requirements, however when I run this command it returns me an error says: grep: w: No such file or directory
I am thinking that maybe there are some limitations of the flags in bash? Sorry I am not really familiar with the language, didn't read much about the MAN page etc. If anyone could help me to solve the puzzle it would be appreciated :) In addition, i think if possible I would like to add a -q to surpress the output when there is a match also, right now I didn't add it in the example since it couldn't make it through with 3 flags even. So can anyone give me some hints here? Thanks in advance!

Hereby some explanation from the manpage:
OPTIONS
Generic Program Information
...
-F, --fixed-strings
Interpret PATTERNS as fixed strings, ...
-f FILE, --file=FILE
Obtain patterns from FILE, ...
-w, --word-regexp
Select only those lines ...
As you can see, the options -F and -w are indicated ending immediately (hence the comma in -F, and -w,), but the -f switch is followed by FILE, with means they belong together.
I you want to preserve the order Ffw, that's possible, but then you need to do something like:
grep -Ff b.txt -w a.txt

As mentioned by #kvantour, the solution is simply placing the -f before the b.txt file. grep -Fwf b.txt a.txt
Should have thought it when it says 'no such file or directory' as it was a clear indication that flags after the -f were treated as the path already.

How to make output of any shell command unbuffered?

Is there a way to run shell commands without output buffering?
For example, hexdump file | ./my_script will only pass input from hexdump to my_script in buffered chunks, not line by line.
Actually I want to know a general solution how to make any command unbuffered?

Try stdbuf, included in GNU coreutils and thus virtually any Linux distro. This sets the buffer length for input, output and error to zero:
stdbuf -i0 -o0 -e0 command

The command unbuffer from the expect package disables the output buffering:
Ubuntu Manpage: unbuffer - unbuffer output
Example usage:
unbuffer hexdump file | ./my_script

AFAIK, you can't do it without ugly hacks. Writing to a pipe (or reading from it) automatically turns on full buffering and there is nothing you can do about it :-(. "Line buffering" (which is what you want) is only used when reading/writing a terminal. The ugly hacks exactly do this: They connect a program to a pseudo-terminal, so that the other tools in the pipe read/write from that terminal in line buffering mode. The whole problem is described here:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/stdio_buffering/
The page has also some suggestions (the aforementioned "ugly hacks") what to do, i.e. using unbuffer or pulling some tricks with LD_PRELOAD.

You could also use the script command to make the output of hexdump line-buffered (hexdump will be run in a pseudo terminal which tricks hexdump into thinking its writing its stdout to a terminal, and not to a pipe).
# cf. http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/25372/turn-off-buffering-in-pipe/
stty -echo -onlcr
script -q /dev/null hexdump file | ./my_script # FreeBSD, Mac OS X
script -q -c "hexdump file" /dev/null | ./my_script # Linux
stty echo onlcr

One should use grep or egrep "--line-buffered" options to solve this. no other tools needed.

grep command to replace multiline text from httpd.conf file on Fedora

I am a newbie to shell scripting and to Linux environment as well.
In my project I am trying to search for following text from the httpd.conf file
<Directory '/somedir/someinnerdir'>
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
and then remove this text and again rewrite the same text.
The reason to do this rewriting is that the script will be run on first installation of the web app, but it may again be run some time later as other part of this shell script is performing other tasks as well. So for first time this text wont be found and will simply be written but later again when script is run this text will be found and will need to be removed and the written again.
So the part of my script with which I am trying to achieve this is something like :
grep -ve "<Directory '/somedir/someinnerdir'>\\nAllowOverride All\\n</Directory>" /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf > tmp_direct
echo -e "<Directory '/somedir/someinnerdir'>\\nAllowOverride All\\n</Directory>" >> tmp_direct
mv tmp_direct /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
I dont have the code in front of me currently so there may be some syntactical errors above but the logic/coding is same.
Above code fragment is not able to do what I want to achieve as the grep command doesnt support multiline searching.
My OS is Fedora 8.
Can you please suggest something in this code to achieve what is needed or may be some other alternative.
Any help in this regard will be highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Thanks for your replies.
Sorry for the previous bad code. Its corrected now.
Charlie and i-moan, due to workability constraints I wont be able to implement sed or perl as it will need to be added to the environment we will distribute this project in.
Steve, I want to do the check for multiple lines. I didnt put it in code blocks so it removed the directory tags. :(
So I will need to find some other way out.
Thanks again.
Best regards.

This sounds like a job for sed(1). What you want will be very close to
sed -i.bak -e '/AllowOverride All/i# ' file
to comment out the line (remember httpd.conf has comments) followed by
sed -i.bak -e 's/# AllowOverride All/AllowOverride All ' file
to pujt it back.
WARNING I haven't tried it, you want to read the man page and test it youself.

If you want to make sure you're matching an entire line, you could do:
grep -v "^AllowOverride All$"
The ^ matches the start of line and $ matches the end of line.
Does that help? I'm not exactly clear on what you're trying to do with the grep.

I'm unsure I understand the question.
Correct me if I'm wrong but your trying to add 'AllowOverride All' to the httpd.conf on the 1st running of your script. If so do you want it enabled?
Then on a 2nd pass you may want to enable / disable the command?
If I remember correctly 'AllowOverride' is only allowed in a < Directory > section So it only makes sense to add / enable in < Directory >< /Directory > definition:
If above is true you could do this in perl..
1st run: to add
perl -0777 -pi
-e 's{(.?(?!AllowOverride\s+All).?)}[\nAllowOverride
All\n$1]ixgs' httpd.conf
This will add 'AllowOverride All' to a Directory section only if it does not already contain one.
2nd run: to alter
On the 2nd run you could comment out as Charlie's suggested.. or if you like perl
perl -0777 -pi
-e's{(.?)(AllowOverride\s+All)(.?)}[$1#$2$3]ixgs' httpd.conf
and to comment in
perl -0777 -pi
-e's{(.?)(#AllowOverride\s+All)(.?)}[$1AllowOverride\s+All$3]ixgs'
httpd.conf
The regex s{}[] is quite verbose and there are better regex's to do the same thing but this is easier ( hopefully ) for a beginner to understand :).
Explanation of the perl command options
-0777 force Perl to read the whole file in one shot because 0777 is not a legal character value
-p places a loop around your script
-i lets you edit files in-place ( so your command in '-e' change the file )
-e lets you specify a single line of code on the command line
In that single line we have a regex. see perldoc perlre for info on that.
Hope that helps

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