How to bypass a bindkey directive in GNU screen? - key-bindings

I use the bindkey command in my .screenrc file to make use of the F5 and F6 keys:
# Split/restore on F5/F6
bindkey -k k5 split
bindkey -k k6 only
However, a few programs use those keys as inputs (like htop). Is there a way of bypassing the GNU screen key bindings so that those keystrokes go to the current terminal?
I've tried Ctrl-a, F5 but that doesn't seem to work. And it doesn't seem to mention anything about bypassing the bindings in the documentation.

Looks like I've figured it out.
The mapdefault command is intended for this purpose.
With the following added to the .screenrc file you are able to type Ctrl-A e <key> or Ctrl-A Ctrl-E <key> and have <key> sent to the terminal:
# It's sometimes useful to have a quote key.
bind ^E mapdefault
bind e mapdefault

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]

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'`

Ubuntu Cmake: Parse error in command line argument [duplicate]

-D CMAKE_C_COMPILER is what I use to choose my compiler. However, if I have CMake options that are turned on/off like USEIPHONEFLAG, I need to do -DUSEIPHONEFLAG=1, -D USEIPHONEFLAG=1 does not work. I was wondering how the space after -D works in CMake.
CMake's command line parsing is not very consistent or robust unfortunately.
This issue is probably down to the order in which you pass the arguments.
Internally, CMake iterates over the command line arguments twice. The first time it's looking for non-cache arguments and skips any beginning with -D. Any that don't fit into the list of proper args are assumed to be the path to the CMakeLists.txt file (or the directory, or the CMakeCache.txt).
It's assuming that there will be only one path passed, and does nothing to validate that assumption. Herein lies the problem. If you've passed -D Foo=1, then -D is seen as a complete argument and is skipped, and Foo=1 is seen as a path.
On the second iteration through the args, it now grabs the values given via -D, but on this run it correctly handles spaces after the -D. So it understands that -D Foo=1 is setting Foo to 1.
So, the position of the path in your command line is all-important here.
cmake -D Foo=1 MyProject/CMakeLists.txt # --> Works
cmake MyProject/CMakeLists.txt -D Foo=1 # --> Fails
To complicate things further, you can wrap the space in quotes and have CMake parse it, but the variable name then includes the space and is unusable in the CMakeLists file.
cmake MyProject/CMakeLists.txt "-D Foo=1" # --> Defines the unusable var ${ Foo}
Another inconsistency is that other command line flags work with or without a space (e.g. -G), and others require a space (e.g. -E).
My own advice would be to always avoid adding a space after the flag unless it's required. I guess always passing the path last would help too, although that shouldn't be required if you don't add extra spaces.

grep command that works on Ubuntu, but not on Fedora

I clean hacked Wordpress installations for clients on a regular basis, and I have a set of scripts that I have written to help me track down where the sites are hacked. One code snippet that I use on a regular basis worked fine on Ubuntu, but since switching to Fedora on Friday has quite behaving as expected. The command is this:
grep -Iri --exclude "*.js" "eval\s*(" * | grep -rivf ~/safeevals.txt >../foundevals.txt;
What it is supposed to happen (and did happen when I was using Ubuntu): grep through all non-binary files, excluding Javascript includes, for all occurances of the eval() function, then perform a negative match on a line by line basis against all known occurances of the eval() function in a vanilla installation of Wordpress (the patterns of which are in ~/safeevals.txt).
What is actually happening: The first part is working fine, as I ran it separately and it did find all instances of eval() in the installation. However, instead of greping through those results, after the pipe is it re-grepping through all of the files, returning a negative match of ~/safeevals.txt (ie. pretty much every line of every file in the installation).
Any idea why the second grep isn't acting on the piped data, or what I need to do to fix it? Thanks.
-Michael
Just tested on my Debian box: apparently, grep -r likes to assume a default argument of .. I am really wondering if that behaviour is valid. Anyway, I guess dropping the -r option from the second grep command will fix it.
Edit: rgrep defaulting to $PWD seems to be a recent change in grep, see this discussion on unix.stackexchange and the link there to the commit in the upstream grep code repository.

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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