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Full Discussion: problems with sed and bash. Escaped characters ?
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting problems with sed and bash. Escaped characters ? Post 302234264 by macL on Tuesday 9th of September 2008 10:58:18 AM
Old 09-09-2008
problems with sed and bash. Escaped characters ?
Hi, I'm writing a long script for bash (on RHEL 5.0) to execute many commands. So, my idea is to create a function to deal with error checking and logging (see ceckoutput() below). This works with all commands except for sed. I think it may be a problems with escaped characters. So I did the following tests :

bash-3.00$ bin/sed -i -e 's/\(.* \)/\1 console=ttyS0,115200/' grub.conf
bash-3.00$ echo $?
0
bash-3.00$ export cmnd="/bin/sed -i -e 's/\(.* \)/\1 console=ttyS0,115200/' grub.conf"
bash-3.00$ echo $cmnd
/bin/sed -i -e 's/\(.*\)/\1 console=ttyS0,115200/' grub.conf
bash-3.00$ $cmnd
/bin/sed: -e expression #1, char 1: unknown command: `''

I even tried changing the quotes to avoid shell substitutions:

export cmnd='/bin/sed -i -e "s%\(.*\)%\1 console=ttyS0,115200%" grub.conf'
bash-3.00$ $cmnd
/bin/sed: -e expression #1, char 1: unknown command: `"'

Any ideas why this is happening?
Would it be a good idea idea to use awk to edit the file ? if so please help me with that command.


ceckoutput (){

$1 2>&1 |tee -a $LOGFILE

if [ ${PIPESTATUS[0]} -ne 0 ];then
echo "Error in installation!! See $LOGFILE"
exit 1
fi
}

Regards,
MacL
 

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LEARN ABOUT OPENSOLARIS

shells

shells(4)							   File Formats 							 shells(4)

NAME

       shells - shell database

SYNOPSIS

       /etc/shells

DESCRIPTION

       The shells file contains a list of the shells on the system. Applications use this file to determine whether a shell is valid. See getuser-
       shell(3C). For each shell a single line should be present, consisting of the shell's path, relative to root.

       A hash mark (#) indicates the beginning of a comment; subsequent characters up to the end of the line are not interpreted by  the  routines
       which search the file. Blank lines are also ignored.

       The following default shells are used by utilities: /bin/bash, /bin/csh, /bin/jsh, /bin/ksh, /bin/ksh93, /bin/pfcsh, /bin/pfksh, /bin/pfsh,
       /bin/sh, /bin/tcsh, /bin/zsh, /sbin/jsh, /sbin/sh, /usr/bin/bash, /usr/bin/csh, /usr/bin/jsh, /usr/bin/ksh, /usr/bin/ksh93, /usr/bin/pfcsh,
       /usr/bin/pfksh, /usr/bin/pfsh, and /usr/bin/sh, /usr/bin/tcsh, /usr/bin/zsh, and /usr/sfw/bin/zsh. /etc/shells overrides the default list.

       Invalid shells in /etc/shells could cause unexpected behavior, such as being unable to log in by way of ftp(1).

FILES

       /etc/shells    list of shells on system

SEE ALSO

       vipw(1B), ftpd(1M), sendmail(1M), getusershell(3C), aliases(4)

SunOS 5.11							    20 Nov 2007 							 shells(4)
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