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Homework and Emergencies Homework & Coursework Questions Problem with Shell Scripts deleting text in files. Post 302686431 by Johnny2518 on Tuesday 14th of August 2012 01:19:45 PM
Old 08-14-2012
Problem with Shell Scripts deleting text in files.

Me and a friend are working on a project, and We have to create a script that can go into a file, and replace all occurances of a certain expression/word/letter with another using Sed. It is designed to go through multiple tests replacing all these occurances, and we don't know what they will be so we have to anticipate anything. We are having trouble on a certain test where we need to replace 'l*' with 'L' in different files using a loop. The code that i have is

Code:
#!/bin/sh
 p1="$1" #first parameter

shift

 p2="$1"

shift

for file in "$@" #for any file in the directory

do
   # A="$1"

    #echo $A
    #B="$2"
    echo "$p1" | sed -e 's/\([*.[^$]\)/\\\1/g' > temporary #treat all special characters as plain text
A="`cat 'temporary'`"
rm temporary
echo "$p1"
echo "$file"
sed "s/$p1/$p2/g" "$file" > myFile.txt.updated #replace occurances 
mv myFile.txt.updated "$file"
cat "$file"
done

I have tried testing this on practice files that contain different words and also 'l*' But whenever i test it, it deletes all the text in the file. Can someone help me with this,

Moderator's Comments:
Mod Comment edit by bakunin: For a number of reasons it is imperative for students posting here to use the template provided. This is not the case here.

I am going to close this thread, please create another thread and fill out the template correctly, i will merge it into this thread here and reopen it.

Last edited by bakunin; 08-15-2012 at 03:26 AM.. Reason: Code tags, please...
 

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AUSEARCH_ADD_expression(3)					  Linux Audit API					AUSEARCH_ADD_expression(3)

NAME
ausearch_add_expression - build up search expression SYNOPSIS
#include <auparse.h> int ausearch_add_expression(auparse_state_t *au, const char *expression, char **error, ausearch_rule_t how); DESCRIPTION
ausearch_add_item adds an expression to the current audit search expression. The search conditions can then be used to scan logs, files, or buffers for something of interest. The expression parameter contains an expression, as specified in ausearch-expression(5). The how parameter determines how this search expression will affect the existing search expression, if one is already defined. The possi- ble values are: AUSEARCH_RULE_CLEAR Clear the current search expression, if any, and use only this search expression. AUSEARCH_RULE_OR If a search expression E is already configured, replace it by (E || this_search_expression). AUSEARCH_RULE_AND If a search expression E is already configured, replace it by (E && this_search_expression). RETURN VALUE
If successful, ausearch_add_expression returns 0. Otherwise, it returns -1, sets errno and it may set *error to an error message; the caller must free the error message using free(3). If an error message is not available or can not be allocated, *error is set to NULL. SEE ALSO
ausearch_add_item(3), ausearch_add_interpreted_item(3), ausearch_add_timestamp_item(3), ausearch_add_regex(3), ausearch_set_stop(3), ause- arch_clear(3), ausearch_next_event(3), ausearch-expression(5). AUTHOR
Miloslav Trmac Red Hat Feb 2008 AUSEARCH_ADD_expression(3)
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