Shell Programming and Scripting

could you post an input file AND the desired output, pls - it might be easier to understand the objective.

change the confidential data to something meaningless if there's a concern.

Yes, I am sorry for the vague goals. To describe: I am trying to add a ServerAlias line to about 7/8 of the virtual servers in an apache config file. These foolish customers want: www.subdomain.domain.TLD. In the existing structure, I just have:

<VirtualHost *>
DocumentRoot "/home/thedomain/allison"
ServerName allison.thedomain.com
<Directory "/home/thedomain/allison">
allow from all
Options +Indexes
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

I need to add a line like this below the ServerName line:

ServerAlias www.allison.thedomain.com

So,

<VirtualHost *>
DocumentRoot "/home/thedomain/allison"
ServerName allison.thedomain.com
ServerAlias www.allison.thedomain.com
<Directory "/home/thedomain/allison">
allow from all
Options +Indexes
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>


This has to happen in about 400 or so virtual servers, but the config has other domains besides 'thedomain.com'.

TIA,
Bob

something like this?

Code:

nawk '/ServerName/ { print; printf("ServerAlias www.%s\n", $2);next}1' apacheConfig

Wow you are great!.... so my logic of going through the woods instead of over the river just shines brightly! The only thing I would like to add to this is the ability to just add the ServerAlias to virtual servers of a specific domain. There are some servers on here that I do not want to change...>So, just for thedomain.com. Since the domain that I am looking for (thedomain.com) is on the same line as ServerName, I hope that I can add something to the nawk line.

I have learned how to do this is sed, but I am not sure how to implement this with nawk:

#this is just like grepping lines with ServerName and thedomain.com in them.
sed '/ServerName/!d; /thedomain.com/!d' httpd.conf

-Bob

Code:

# the 'dom' to whatever domain you want to affect

nawk -v dom='thedomain.com' '{print} $0 ~ ("ServerName.*" dom "$") / { printf("ServerAlias www.%s\n", $2)}' apacheConfig

I want to thank you for your help.

This may sound like a childish thing to ask but what sort of path would you recommend I should take to learn some of these utilities? Sed and awk are really not that easy when talking about shell scripts. Any directions and/or books that you can suggest? I am in the beginning stages of learning ruby.....any thoughts on that language?

thanks again,
/bob