Sponsored Content
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting escaping metacharacters in paths for a shell command Post 302613777 by cue on Tuesday 27th of March 2012 07:57:22 PM
Old 03-27-2012
escaping metacharacters in paths for a shell command

I have a file which contains a list of paths separated by a new line character.

e.g

Code:
/some/path/to/a/file.png
/some/path to/another/file.jpeg
/some path/to yet/another/file

Notice that these paths may contain metacharacters, the spaces for example are also not escaped.

If I wanted to use this list in a command which allows multiple paths as input what would be the best way to do this?

for example the command

Code:
montage "/some/path/to/a/file.png" "/some/path to/another/file.jpeg" "/some path/to yet/another/file"

I thought about using awk to replace the newline characters with quotation marks. Is there a nice clean way of doing this.
 

10 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting

1. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

ctrl-c: not escaping command

using ksh on HP 11.11. I'm new to HP, so maybe it's something I need to turn on in HP, but I figured it's probably in ksh. If I run "grep aaa" (or any command) Whenever I try to Ctrl-C it does not work. I'm not saying it did work before, as I'm new to the environment. Do I need to set a... (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: dangral
3 Replies

2. Shell Programming and Scripting

escaping * in korn shell

When trying to escape special character * - it doesn't seem to work. In korn shell trying to store a local variable as follows sample=test* echo $sample - gets all the file names starting with test* , instead i want to literally store the value test* into a variable. I tried escaping with \, with... (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: prekida
3 Replies

3. Shell Programming and Scripting

Escaping apostrophe using shell script

Hi, I am using the KSH shell. I am facing a problem of escaping apostrophe('), that is occuring in a variable. I used the following command, but in vain item=`echo $item|sed 's/'/\'/g'` this code replaces the occurance of ' in an xml file to apostrophe(') symbol. The output of... (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: mradul_kaushik
2 Replies

4. Shell Programming and Scripting

escaping backslashes to evaluate paths

Hi there, i am struggling with this one, basically i want to replace an existing path string in a file with a new one, but the new one contains slashes which causes problems with "sed", i thought i could change the replacement string into a variable but of course when the variable is evaluated... (4 Replies)
Discussion started by: surfbus78
4 Replies

5. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

The ll command + metacharacters

Hello. I am learning how to use Unix through an online course. Unfortunately the text that we use isn't very good, so I could use some help with a pretty basic question. Use metacharacters and the ll command to list all filenames under the datafiles directory that contain a dot "." with the... (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: feverdream
2 Replies

6. Shell Programming and Scripting

awk - ignore metacharacters, search shell variables

Can I use awk to search for a string, passed from the shell, that might include metacharacters? File1 entries: Bob Marley Jammin (Bonus Track).mp3 File2 entries: Bob Marley Jammin (Bonus Track).mp3 32000 /Music/Bob Marley/ Jammin (Bonus Track).mp3 So far, I have this; $ sed -e... (9 Replies)
Discussion started by: DSommers
9 Replies

7. Shell Programming and Scripting

Escaping problem in a shell script

Hi, i made a gnuplot script which accepts a filename as parameter (using gnuplot -e) now i want to run this script from a shell script, the correct command (with a concrete parameter) looks like this: gnuplot -e 'name="filename.dat;col=2"' gplscript.gpl my shell script looks like this: ... (4 Replies)
Discussion started by: franko007
4 Replies

8. Shell Programming and Scripting

Bash Vs. Bourne REGEX: metacharacters escaping

I am currently reading a very old reference from O'Reilly: Sed and Awk 2nd Edition reprinted in 2000. So far, it's a solid read and still very relevant. I'd highly recommend this to anyone. The only problem I have with this book is that I had to resort to bourne shell to get my examples to work... (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: ConcealedKnight
3 Replies

9. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Command line not recognizing metacharacters in awk

Hello, I'm new to command line coding (and coding in general) and have run into a problem. I'm using awk to perform a global find and replace in a text file in the Terminal provided by Mac. Here is a sample of my textfile where the fields are separated by tabs. 1Ps 1,1 VWB/(J VWB VWB... (7 Replies)
Discussion started by: jvoot
7 Replies

10. UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Help with bash escaping while using screen command

Hello, everyone. I'm currently trying to write a command system for a Minecraft server using screen. Here are the scripts I'm currently using. 0.sh #!/bin/bash screen -S Test114 -dm java -Xmx4G -jar server.jar nogui 1.sh #!/bin/bash args="$@" args2="${args@Q}" #args3=`printf '%q\n'... (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: Develon
2 Replies
SYSTEMD-PATH(1) 						   systemd-path 						   SYSTEMD-PATH(1)

NAME
systemd-path - List and query system and user paths SYNOPSIS
systemd-path [OPTIONS...] [NAME...] DESCRIPTION
systemd-path may be used to query system and user paths. The tool makes many of the paths described in file-hierarchy(7) available for querying. When invoked without arguments, a list of known paths and their current values is shown. When at least one argument is passed, the path with this name is queried and its value shown. The variables whose name begins with "search-" do not refer to individual paths, but instead to a list of colon-separated search paths, in their order of precedence. OPTIONS
The following options are understood: --suffix= The printed paths are suffixed by the specified string. -h, --help Print a short help text and exit. --version Print a short version string and exit. EXIT STATUS
On success, 0 is returned, a non-zero failure code otherwise. SEE ALSO
systemd(1), file-hierarchy(7) systemd 237 SYSTEMD-PATH(1)
All times are GMT -4. The time now is 06:19 AM.
Unix & Linux Forums Content Copyright 1993-2022. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy