Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello

I use sed to insert text into files in unix shell scripts and I've noticed that sed create empty files such as
sed6OAPQ6, sedioICv3, sedOYkVW6, sedu1yKVY, etc.

Whay sed creates these files and how to fix this issue?

thanks in advance

rgds

Teo

Show your sed code please.

This is a sed sample I use

for m in `awk '$0 ~ /urlWebservice/ {print}' ./localConfiguration.conf`
do
if [ -n "$m" ] ; then
t=`echo $m | cut -d"=" -f1`
for j in `awk '$0 ~ /'$t'/ {print}' $file`
do
s=`echo $j | grep http`
if [ -n "$s" ] ; then
sed -i 's#^'$t'.*#'$m'#' $file
fi
done
fi
done

I don't see any point in this script where anything is redirected into a file for example. So I guess it is not this script or part of a script producing those empty files.

You can add a "set -x" in the beginning to check what it is doing maybe.

Are you sure no other script creating those empty files or is there missing something from that script?
Maybe delete those empty files and execute the lines you just posted and see if they are there again, just to be sure.

Btw., there are [ code ] and [ /code ] tags available in this forum to post code a bit more readable.

This is just a part of the sed use. I'll try to use -x option to get more info.

thanks

As a matter of style and maintainability, you probably want to replace the awk scripts with grep, and use while instead of for.

Code:

grep urlWebservice ./localConfiguration.conf |
while read m; do
  t=${m%=*}
  grep "$t" $file |
  while read j; do
    case $j in *http*)  sed -i 's#^'"$t"'.*#'"$m"'#' $file;; esac
  done
done

Something outside of this part of the script is responsible for setting $file so that is my guess at the culprit.

If there are multiple occurrences of $t in a file, you needlessly perform the same substitution multiple times. Perhaps you simply want to check whether $file contains $t and "http", and if so, perform the replacement once?

Code:

if grep "$t" $file | grep http >/dev/null; then
  sed -i 's#^'"$t"'.*#'"$m"'#' "$file"
fi

Thanks for your answer

I didn't post all the script. I don't understand why $file is the culprit.
May be it's due to the use of g option for replacement. Not sure.

I believe that the empty files called sedXX could be the temporary data buffer used by sed.

Teo