Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello Guys,

I have made a script where am using "-i" option with sed comand. I made the script on a Linux box, however, I need to run this on a Solaris box and it's not working on solaris platform. I get an error that -i is illegal option. Here is the script i am trying to run on Solaris,

Code:

ADDRESS=`grep -i "^$1$" test.com`
if [ `echo $?` -eq 0 ]
then
        `sed -e '/^'$ADDRESS'$/d' -i test.com`
        echo "Email Address $ADDRESS has been deleted from the file test.com"
else
        echo "Email Adress $1 does not exists in the file solae.com. Exiting without making any changes to test.com file."
fi

Any help in this regard would be greaty appreciated !!!

Hi,

Why the back ticks on `echo $?` and the sed command?

Otherwise to answer your question, you can easily redirect your sed output to a temporary file and copy it on the original. Make sure to have a backup of the original file just in case.

Code:

sed '.........' original_file > /tmp/modified_file; mv /tmp/modified_file original_file

The option -i is an extension of GNU sed, and does not work on most other versions of sed. You'll have to use temporary files to get the same result (don't forget to clean up), or switch to Perl:

Code:

perl -n -i -e 'print unless /^'$ADDRESS'$/' test.com

@ Ripat and Pludi
yes, the idea of using a temp file has worked. Thank you !!!
Basically what I am trying to is as follows,
We have a file which has the complete list of email addresses of users with an organisation. if a user leaves we need to delete his/her email address. Is there any other command we can use other than Sed (to avoid temp file solution) to delete the addresses from a file. I am not familiar with perl, so do not know how to use it.

Again ... nay suggestions in this regard would be greatly appreciated.

Important Note: you want to backup your file in case anything goes wrong.

Code:

perl -n -i.bak -e 'print unless /^'$ADDRESS'$/' test.com

Regards,
gaurav.

Working with a temporary file is not a problem. That's what sed does internally with the -i switch (don't know for perl but I would imagine that it does the same).

For your problem pick the tool you are the most comfortable with: sed, perl, awk. If your email address database is large, you would probably prefer to switch to a real DBMS. It can be lightweight like sqlite.

And it should stay there, please. In order to keep our database clean and logical keep to one thread per problem.