UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I need to pass a parameter that will then be grepped.

I need it to grep /paramater and then have a space

so if 123 was passed my grep would be grep '/123 ' sample.log

this works fine from the command line

but when i try and set it searchThis="/$2 "

and then run grep $searchThis $logfile

it doesnt work, any ideas?

It doesn't work because it returns too many lines, or no lines?

You should enclose the grep expression in quotes:

Code:

grep "$searchThis" $logfile

if you expect it to add the space to the search.

returns nothing

logFile=~/access/access.log

searchParam="/$1 "
grep "$searchParam" $logfile

What is $1? Are you running this grep in a script? (you said $2 in your original post)

Show me how you run the script (i.e. if you pass $searchParam to the script, do you quote that (i.i.e mySctipt "$searchParam")).

this is the full script, its going into an infinite loop


#!bash


logFile=~/access/access.log

searchParam="/$1 "
grep "$searchParam" $logfile

That's no surprise, really.

The variable has a capital F and the grep command doesn't:

Code:

logFile=~/access/access.log
 
searchParam="/$1 "
grep "$searchParam" $logfile

It hasn't gone into an infinite loop... it's just waiting for input because $logfile is blank the shell evaluates that to nothing (not a filename as you thought).

It is a good practice to check for uninitialized variables in a shell.

$logfile would have hopefully been caught in that.

Regards,
HKansal