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# Introduction to Shell Scripting - Part 3

By Ben Okopnik

Originally published in Issue 54 of Linux Gazette, May 2000

    Never write it in 'C' if you can do it in 'awk';
    Never do it in 'awk' if 'sed' can handle it;
    Never use 'sed' when 'tr' can do the job;
    Never invoke 'tr' when 'cat' is sufficient;
    Avoid using 'cat' whenever possible.
     -- Taylor's Laws of Programming

Last month, we looked at loops and conditional execution. This time around, we'll look at a few of the simpler "external" tools (i.e., GNU utilities) that are commonly used in shell scripts. Recall that shell scripts are made up of 1) internal shell commands and structures, 2) external tools, comprised of the standard utilities, and 3) installed programs; the first are always going to be there, as long as you're executing the script with the same shell (the shebang usually takes care of that), the second will usually be there (but watch out for non-portable syntax between different versions, e.g., the '-A' switch in 'cat', the various levels of regex parsing in different 'grep' versions, etc.), and the last is essentially arbitrary since you don't know what another person executing your script has installed (or not installed) on their machine. If you're planning on distributing your script, you may need to write code to test for the presence of any external programs you use and issue warnings if they're absent.

Oh, and - the reason for the above quote: the tools available to you as a script writer, as you might have guessed from it, are arranged in a rough sort of a "power hierarchy". It's important to remember this if you find yourself continually being frustrated by the limitations of a specific tool, it may not have enough "juice" to do the job. Conversely, it does not make sense to use some heavy-duty utility that's big and slow to perform a simple operation.

Some years ago, while writing a script that processed Clipper database files, I found myself pushed up against the wall by the limitations of arrays in "bash"; after a day and a half of fighting it, I swore a bitter oath, glued a "screw it" label over the original attempt, and rewrote the entire thing in "awk".

It took a total of 15 minutes.

I didn't tell anyone at the time; even my good friends would have taken a Clue-By-4 to my head to make sure that the lesson stuck...

Don't be stubborn about changing tools when the original one proves under-powered.

### cat

Strange as it may seem, 'cat' - which you've probably used on innumerable occasions - can do a number of useful things beyond simple concatenation and printing to the screen. As an example, 'cat -v file.txt' will print the contents of "file.txt" to the screen - and will also show you all the non-text characters that might normally be invisible (this excludes the standard textfile characters such as `end-of-line' and `tab'), in '^' (for Ctrl- characters) and 'M-' (for Alt- characters) notation. This can be very useful when you've got something that is supposed to be a text file, but various utilities keep failing to process it and give errors like "This is a binary file!". This capability can also come in handy when converting files from one type to another (see the section on 'tr'). If you decide you'd like to see all the characters in the file, the `-A' switch will fill the bill - `$' signs will show the end-of-lines (the buck stops here?), and `^I' will show the tabs. Note that '-A' is just a shortcut for '-vet' - something that used to be known as "taking your cat to the vet". (Yes, Unix command usage can be quite odd. :)

'-n' is another useful option. This one will number all the lines (you can use `-b' to number only the non-blank lines) of a file - very useful when you want to create a `line selector', i.e., whenever you want to have a "handle" for a specific line which you would then pass to another utility, say, 'sed' (which works well with line numbers).

'cat' can also be used for "here-doc"s - i.e., to generate multi-line, formatted text output. The syntax is a little odd but not difficult; here are two script "snippets" showing the differences between using 'echo' and a here-doc:

    ...
    echo "'guess' - a shell script that reads your mind"
    echo "and runs the program you're thinking about."
    echo
    echo "Syntax:"
    echo
    echo "guess [-fnrs]"
    echo
    echo "-f Force mode: if no mental activity is detected,"
    echo "   take a Scientific Wild-Ass Guess (SWAG) and execute."
    echo "-n Read your neighbor's mind; commonly used to retrieve"
    echo "   the URLs of really good porno sites."
    echo "-r Reboot brain via TCP (Telepathic Control Protocol) - for
    echo "   those times when you're drawing a complete blank."
    echo "-s Read the supervisor's mind; implies the '-f' option."
    echo
    exit
    ...

    ...
    cat <<!
    'guess' - a shell script that reads your mind
    and runs the program you're thinking about.

    Syntax:

    guess [-fnrs]

    -f Force mode: if no mental activity is detected,
       take a Scientific Wild-Ass Guess (SWAG) and execute.
    -n Read your neighbor's mind; commonly used to retrieve
       the URLs of really good porno sites.
    -r Reboot brain via TCP (Telepathic Control Protocol) - for
       those times when you're drawing a complete blank.
    -s Read the supervisor's mind; implies the '-f' option.

    !
    exit
    ...

Everything between the two exclamation points will be printed to 'stdout' (the screen) as formatted. Note that the terminator ('!', in this case) is arbitrary - you could use 'EOF' or '^+-+^' or 'This_is_the_end_my_friend' - but '!' is traditional. The only constraints on the above are, there must be a space between the terminator and the redirection symbol following it (otherwise, the redirector could be seen as a part of the terminator!), and the closing terminator must be on a line by itself, with no trailing whitespace. This allows the terminator to be used as a part of the text without closing the here-doc.

Using the same mechanism with redirection gives you a mini-editor:

    ben@Fenrir:~$ cat <<! > file.txt
    > Everything entered here
    > 	will be written to file.txt
    > 		exactly as entered.
    !
    ben@Fenrir:~$ cat file.txt
    Everything entered here
            will be written to file.txt
                    exactly as entered.

I tend to think of 'cat' as an "initial processor" for text that will be further worked on with other tools. That's not to say that it's unimportant - in some cases, it's almost irreplaceable. Indeed, your 'cat' can do tricks that are not only entertaining but useful... and you don't even need a litter box.

### tr

When it comes to "character-by-character" processing, this utility, despite its oddities in certain respects (e.g., characters specified by their ASCII value have to be entered in octal), is one of the most useful ones in our toolbox. Here's a script using it that replaces those "DOS-text-to-Unix" conversion utilities:

    #!/bin/bash
    [ -z "$1" ] && {
    	echo "d2u - converts DOS text to Unix."
    	echo "Syntax: d2u <file>"
    	exit
    }

    cat "$1"|tr -d '\015'

<grin> I guess I'd better take time to explain; I can already hear the screams of rage from all those folks who just learned about 'if' constructs in last month's column.

"What happened to that nice `if' statement you said we needed at the beginning of the script? and what's that `&&' thing?"

Believe it or not, it's all still there - at least the mechanism that makes the "right stuff" happen. Now, though, instead of using the structure of the statement and fitting our commands into the "slots" in the syntax, we use the return value of the commands, and make the logic do the work. Let's take a look at this very important concept.

Whenever you use a command, it returns a code on exit - typically 0 for success, and 1 for failure (exceptions are things like the 'length' function, which returns a value). Some programs return a variety of numbers for specific types of exits, which is why you'd normally want to test for zero versus non-zero, rather than testing for `1' specifically. You can implement the same mechanism in your scripts (this is a good coding policy): if your script generates a variety of messages on different exit conditions, use 'exit n' as the last statement, where `n' is the code to be returned (the plain 'exit' statement will returns the value of the operation immediately preceding it.) These codes, by the way, are invisible - they're internal "flags"; there's nothing printed on the screen, so don't bother looking. If you want to see what the exit code of the last command was, try echoing '$?' - it stores the numerical value of the last exit flag.

To test for them, 'bash' provides a simple mechanism - the reserved words `&&' (logical AND) and `||' (logical OR). In the script above, the statement basically says "if $1 has a length of zero, then the following statements (echo... echo... exit) should be executed". If you're not familiar with binary logic, this may be confusing, so here's a quick rundown that will suffice for our purposes: back in the days when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, and learning about computers meant understanding hardware design, we had gadgets called 'AND gates' and 'OR gates' - logic circuits - that operated like this:

         AND (&&)                   OR (||)
        truth table                truth table

         A   B  out                 A   B  out
        -----------                -----------
       | 0 | 0 | 0 |              | 0 | 0 | 0 |
       | 0 | 1 | 0 |              | 0 | 1 | 1 |
       | 1 | 0 | 0 |              | 1 | 0 | 1 |
       | 1 | 1 | 1 |              | 1 | 1 | 1 |
        -----------                -----------

    If any input is 0,          If any input is 1,
    the output will be 0.       the output will be 1.

In other words, if we knew the value of one of the inputs, we could decide if we needed to evaluate the other input or not (e.g., with an AND gate, if the known input is a 0, we don't need to evaluate the other one - we know what the output is going to be!) This is the logic we use in dealing with the logical operators in the shell as well: if we have something that is true in front of an AND operator, we obviously need to evaluate (i.e., execute) the back part - and ditto for a false input for an OR operator.

As a comparison, here are two script fragments that do much the same thing:

    if [ -z $1 ]
    then
    	echo "Enter a parameter."
    else
    	echo "Parameter entered."
    fi

    [ -z $1 ] && echo "Enter a parameter." || echo "Parameter entered."

You have to be a bit cautious about using the second version for anything more complex than "echo" statements: if you use a command in the part after the `&&' which returns a failure code, both it and the statements after `||' will be executed, unless you force an explicit successful exit! This in itself can be useful, if that's what you need - but you have to be aware of how the mechanism works.

Back to the original "d2u" script - the "active" part of the script, `cat "$1"|tr -d '\015'`, pipes the original text into 'tr', which deletes DOS's "CR/Carriage Return" character (0x0D), shown here in octal (\015). That's the bit... err, byte that makes DOS text different from Unix text - we use just the "LF/Newline" character (0x0A), while DOS uses both (CR/LF). This is why Unix text looks like

    This is line one*This is line two*This is line three*

in DOS, and DOS text like

    This is line one^M
    This is line two^M
    This is line three^M

in Unix.

"A word to the wise" applicable to any budding shell-script writer: close study of the "tr" man page will pay off handsomely. This is a tool that you will find yourself using again and again.

### head/tail

A very useful pair of tools, with mostly identical syntax. By default they print, respectively, the first/last 10 lines of a given file; the number and the units are easily changed via syntax. Here's a snippet that shows how to read a specific line in a file, using its line number as a "handle" (you may recall this from the discussion on "cat"):

    handle=5
    line="$(head -$handle $1|tail -1)"

Having defined `$handle' as `5', we use "head -$handle" to read a file specified on the command line and print all lines from 1 to 5; we then use "tail -1" to read only the last line of that. This can, of course, be done with more powerful tools like "sed"... but we won't get to that for a bit - and Taylor's law, above, is often a sensible guideline.

These programs can also be used to "identify" very large files without the necessity of reading the whole thing; if you know that one of a number of very large databases contains a unique field name that identifies it as the one you want, you can do something like this:

    for fname in *dbf
    do
    	head -c10k "$fname"|grep -is "cost_in_sheckels_per_cubit"
    	echo $fname
    done

(Yes, I realize we haven't covered 'grep' yet. I trust those readers that aren't familiar with it will use their "man" pages wisely... or hold their water until we get to that part. :)

So - the above case is simple enough; we take the first 10k bytes (you'd adjust it to whatever size chunk is necessary to capture all the field names) off the top of each database by using 'head', then use 'grep' to look for the string. If it's found, we print the name of the file. Those of you who have to deal with large numbers of multi-megabyte databases can really appreciate this capability.

'tail' is interesting in its own way; one of the syntax differences between it and 'head' is the '+' switch, which answers the question of "how do I read everything after the first X characters/lines?" Believe it or not, that can be a very important question - and a very difficult one to answer in any other way... (Also sprach The Voice of Bitter Experience.) As an example, to get the output of something like "ls -l" without the 'total:' header, try`'ls -l|tail +2'`.

### cut/paste

In my experience, 'cut' comes in for a lot more usage than 'paste' - it's very good at dealing with fields in formatted data, allowing you to separate out the info you need. As an example, let's say that you have a directory where you need to get a list of all the files that are 100k or more in size, once a week (logfiles over a size limit, perhaps). You can set up a "cron" job to e-mail you:

     ...
     ls -lr --sort=size $dir|tr -s ' '|cut -d ' ' -f 5,8|grep \
     -E ^'[1-9]{6,} '|mail joe@thefarm.com -s "Logfile info"
     ...

`'ls -lr --sort=size $dir'` gives us a listing of `$dir' sorted by size in `reverse' order (smallest to largest). We pipe that through "tr -s ' '" to collapse all repeated spaces to a single space, then use "cut" with space as a delimiter (now that the spaces are singular, we can actually use them to separate the fields) to return fields 5 and 8 (size and filename). We then use 'grep' to look at the very beginning of the line (where the size is listed) and print every line that starts with a digit, repeats that match 5 times, and is followed by a space. The lines that match are piped into 'mail' and sent off to the recipient.

'paste' can be useful at times. The simplest way of describing it that I can think of is a "vertical 'cat'" - it merges files line by line, instead of "head to tail". If you have, e.g., two files containing, respectively, the names of the people on your mullet-throwing team, and the records for each one arranged in the correct order, you can simply "glue" the two of them together with "paste". If you specify the 'names' files first and the 'records' second, each line of the result would contain the name followed by the record, separated by a tab or whatever delimiter you specified with the '-d' option.

### grep

The "Vise-Grips" of Unix. This utility, as well as its more specialized relatives 'fgrep' and 'egrep', is used primarily for searching files for matching text strings, using the 'regexp' (Regular Expression) mechanism to specify the text to match.

'grep' can be used to answer questions like "Let's see now; I know the quote that I want is in of these 400+ text files in this directory - something about "Who hath desired the Sea". What was it, again?..."

    Odin:~$ grep -iA 12 "who hath desired the sea" *
    Poems.txt-Who hath desired the Sea? - the sight of salt water unbounded -
    Poems.txt-The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber
    Poems.txt- wind-hounded?
    Poems.txt-The sleek-barrelled swell before storm, grey, foamless, enormous,
    Poems.txt- and growing -
    Poems.txt-Stark calm on the lap of the Line or the crazy-eyed hurricane
    Poems.txt- blowing -
    Poems.txt-His Sea in no showing the same - his Sea and the same 'neath each
    Poems.txt- showing:
    Poems.txt- His Sea as she slackens or thrills?
    Poems.txt-So and no otherwise - so and no otherwise - hillmen desire their
    Poems.txt- Hills!
    Odin:~$

"Ah, it's in `Poems.txt'..."

'grep' has a wide variety of options (the "-A <n>" switch that I used above determines the number of lines of context after the matched line that will be printed; the "-i" switch means "ignore case") that allow precise searches within a single file or a group of files, as well as specifying the type of output when a match is found (or conversely, when no match is found). I've used 'grep' in several of the "example" scripts so far, and use it, on the average, about a dozen times a day, command line and script usage together: the search for the above Kipling quote (including my muttered comments) happened just a few minutes before I sharpened my cursor and scribbled this paragraph.

You can also use it to search binary files, by using the '-a' option; an occasionally useful "last-ditch" procedure for those programs where the author has hidden the help/syntax info behind some obscure switch, and 'man', 'info', and the '/usr/doc/' directory come up empty.

Often, there is a requirement for performing some task the same number of times as there are 'useful' lines in a given file, e.g., reading in each line of a configuration file and parsing it. 'grep' helps us here, too:

    ...
    for n in $(egrep -v '^[ 	   ]*(#|$)' ~/.scheduler)
    do
    	...
    	...
    done

This is a snippet from a scheduling program I wrote some time ago; whenever I log in, it reminds me of appointments, etc. for that day. 'egrep', in this instance, finds all the lines that are not comments or blanks, by ignoring (via the '-v' option) all lines that either start with a '#' or with any number of spaces or tabs preceding a '#' or an end-of-line (represented by the '$' metacharacter.) Note that the square brackets above, which define a character class or a range of characters to match, actually contain a space and a tab - both of which are annoyingly invisible. Incidentally, the reason I used e(xtended) grep here is that most versions of simple 'grep' don't know how to parse the '(a|b)' alternation construct - and a character class won't work for that, since metacharacters lose their special meaning in character classes and are simply treated as characters.

The result of the above is that we only loop over "the beef" in the config file, ignoring all non-programmatic input; the "working" lines are parsed, within the body of the "for" loop (details not shown in this snippet) into the date and text variables, and the script executes an "alarm and display" routine if the appointment date matches today's date.

### Wrapping It Up

In order to produce good shell scripts, you need to be very familiar with how all of these tools work - or, at the very least, have a good idea what a given tool can and cannot do (you can always look up the exact syntax via 'man'). There are many other, more complex and powerful tools available to us - but these six programs will get you started and keep you going for a long time, as well as giving you a broad field of possibilities for script experimentation of your own.

Until next month - Happy Linuxing!

"Script Quote" Of The Month:

    "I used to program my IBM PC to make hideous noises to wake me up. I
    also made the conscious decision to hard-code the alarm time into the
    program, so as to make it more difficult for me to reset it. After I
    realised that I was routinely getting up, editing the source file,
    recompiling the program and rerunning it for 15 minutes extra sleep before
    going back to bed, I gave up and made the alarm time a command-line
    option."
     -- B.M. Buck

### References

The "man" pages for 'bash', 'builtins', 'cat', 'head', 'tail', 'cut', 'paste', 'grep', 'strings'

"Introduction to Shell Scripting - The Basics" by Ben Okopnik, LG #52
"Introduction to Shell Scripting - Part I" by Ben Okopnik, LG #53

Ben is the Editor-in-Chief for Linux Gazette and a member of The Answer Gang.

Ben was born in Moscow, Russia in 1962. He became interested in electricity at the tender age of six, promptly demonstrated it by sticking a fork into a socket and starting a fire, and has been falling down technological mineshafts ever since. He has been working with computers since the Elder Days, when they had to be built by soldering parts onto printed circuit boards and programs had to fit into 4k of memory. He would gladly pay good money to any psychologist who can cure him of the recurrent nightmares.

His subsequent experiences include creating software in nearly a dozen languages, network and database maintenance during the approach of a hurricane, and writing articles for publications ranging from sailing magazines to technological journals. After a seven-year Atlantic/Caribbean cruise under sail and passages up and down the East coast of the US, he is currently anchored in St. Augustine, Florida. He works as a technical instructor for Sun Microsystems and a private Open Source consultant/Web developer. His current set of hobbies includes flying, yoga, martial arts, motorcycles, writing, and Roman history; his Palm Pilot is crammed full of alarms, many of which contain exclamation points.

He has been working with Linux since 1997, and credits it with his complete loss of interest in waging nuclear warfare on parts of the Pacific Northwest.

Copyright © 2005, Ben Okopnik. Released under the Open Publication license unless otherwise noted in the body of the article. Linux Gazette is not produced, sponsored, or endorsed by its prior host, SSC, Inc.

Published in Issue 113 of Linux Gazette, April 2005

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