UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am trying to output two command substitutions echo "$(command) $(command)" with a single echo however when using wc -l within the second substitution, that substitution, instead of appearing in order at the end of the line output, it overwrites the beginning of the output line.

I've tried pushing the wc -l output through awk or cut however the overwriting persists.

Any suggestions on how I can definitively pull out the digit output of wc -l without any other control characters coming through into my output?

somegeek

so the output seems to be of only 1 wc command? $() will only strip the last \n. it sounds like a \r but wc shouldn't output that. is this Windows or Cygwin?

if you do

Code:

echo "$(wc -l file) $(wc -l file)" | cat -e

do you get

Code:

0 file^M0 file$

if so try replacing wc with a function that'll strip that

Code:

wc() { command wc "$@" | sed 's/\r//'; }

I'm currently performing this using a one liner in bash... I'm a bit of a script noob.

When I add in cat -e I now see the wc -l output(3 in this case) at the end of the line (woot - no more overlapping output) with the characters you mentioned:

Code:

^M       3$

---------- Post updated at 07:19 PM ---------- Previous update was at 07:09 PM ----------

I did some more poking and piping my echo statement to

Code:

tr -dc '[:print:]'

cleared things up. How can I go back and identify what was causing the issue or was it wc's inherent output formatting?

Appreciate the assitance.

---------- Post updated at 08:56 PM ---------- Previous update was at 07:19 PM ----------

Thinking something is getting through with the files I'm pulling from.

I perform this with some made up files with basic strings and all is well. No overlapping funkiness:

Code:

file1:
windows 7
application 1
application 2
application 3

file2:
windows 7
application 1
application 2
application 3
application 4
application 5



> ls * | while read a; do printf "$a $(egrep "windows" $a) $(egrep application $a | wc -l)\n";done
file1 windows 7       3
file2 windows 7       5

---------- Post updated at 09:43 PM ---------- Previous update was at 08:56 PM ----------

Figured this out with the files I'm working with... tr -d '\r' removed the carriage return but I wasn't sure where since it worked when I put it after the echo statement. Moved it back, one at a time and see it needed to remove that from the first command substitution. All good now. Nothing to do with wc from the look of it at this point... just my own skewed perception.

ls * | while read a; do printf "$a $(egrep "text" $a | tr -d '\r') $(egrep other_text $a | wc -l)\n";done

Thanks again.