bash Data Handling

COMP2101
Winter 2019
Conditional Execution and Testing

Command Lists

Conditional Execution Operators

Exit Status

Test Command
 Command Lists
A command list is a list of one or more commands on a single command line in
bash

Putting more than one command on a line requires placement of an operator

between the commands so that bash can tell them apart

Operators also tell bash the rules for running the command sequence

The ; operator between commands tells bash to run the first command and
when it finishes to run the next one without regard for the success or failure of
the first command
echo -n "Number of non-hidden files in this directory: " ; ls | wc -l
echo -n "Process count by username:" ; ps -eo user --no-headers | sort | uniq -c
echo -n "eno1 interface address:" ; ip a s eno1 | grep -w inet | awk '{print $2}'
Bash Conditional Execution

When a command is run, it may fail and cause other commands

to have problems or become unnecessary

A command may need to be run only under specific

circumstances

A command may depend on another command finishing properly

before it can be run

In order to automate these things, we need to be able to control

the execution of commands in our scripts
Exit Status

Every command we run produces an exit status when it ends

We can use that exit status to tell bash whether or not to run a second command

The exit status of a pipeline is the exit status of the last command that ran in the
pipeline

You can force a script to exit immediately by using the exit command

To set an unsuccessful exit, put a non-zero number on the exit command line e.g.
exit 1

Any time a command might fail and cause problems, your script should be doing
something to recognize and deal with the possible failure
Conditional Command List
Putting the && operator between two commands on one line creates a command list
that only runs the second command if the first command succeeds

Putting the || operator between two commands on one line creates a command list that
only runs the second command if the first command fails

You can build multiple conditional executions on a single command line, but you may
need parentheses to control the order in which they get evaluated

To use both && and || on a command line, put the && first but consider using an if
command instead
cd /flooble || exit 1
grep -q dennis /etc/passwd && echo "User dennis is in the passwd file"
ps -eo user | grep -q dennis || echo "User dennis has no processes running"
sudo find / -user dennis -ls || echo "User dennis owns no files on this system"
Test Command

The test command evaluates an expression and sets its exit

status based on whether the expression evaluates as true or false

We can use the exit status of the test command to control

whether other commands run, in effect running commands based
on the result of the test

test -d ~ && echo "I have a home directory"

test -f myfile || echo "myfile is missing"
test -d ~/Downloads || (mkdir ~/Downloads && echo "Made Downloads dir")
Lab 1 - getpics.sh Script
Long command lines

When you start to use conditional execution and pipelines and more operators, your
command lines can get quite long

You can make these easier to read and debug if you put each command on its own line

Most operators at the end of the line tell bash to continue this command on the next
line, semicolon is a notable exception

When using continuation lines like this, it is good practice to indent the continuation
lines to make it clear to the reader that they are continuation lines

echo -n "eno1 interface address:"

mkdir foo &&
ip a s eno1 |
echo "Made foo" ||
grep -w inet |
echo "Failed to make foo"
awk '{print $2}'
Working With Data

Data on the command line

Variables

Dynamic data

User input
Bash DATA Handling

Bash generally treats command line data as text, in keeping with

UNIX interoperability philosophy

Bash can use any system utility to produce data

Data produced is usually displayed and discarded by the shell

Bash provides variables as a mechanism to temporarily store

simple data
Command Line Data
Bash command lines are evaluated by bash before being executed as commands

Bash handles special things like quotes, character escapes, substitutions, and
arithmetic

Bash then splits a command line into words (aka tokens), with the first word
being the command to run and the rest being things for that command to work
on

You can use the echo echo "It's fun!"

command to display echo A megabyte is $(( 1024 * 1024 )) bytes
evaluated text echo Today is `date +%A`
Shell Data - Text
Commands can look for text on the command line
to use, each word on the line is normally treated cd
as a separate thing to work on
touch My File
You can tell bash to ignore special characters touch 'My File'
when you need to touch "It's My File"
You might want one or more spaces as part of a
touch Another\ File
filename, or to use other special characters as ls
plain text, such as using an apostrophe as part of a
word

' ' turn off all special characters except '


" " turn off most special characters, $ () and ` is still special inside ""

\ turns off any special meanings of only the very next character after the \
File Name Globbing

As part of substitution, bash looks for *, ?, and [ ] in words on the

command line

If one or more of these are found in words on the command line, bash
may try to turn those words into filenames - this is called globbing

Give extra thought to escaping these characters on your command line

ls *
echo *
ls .?
Shell Data - Numbers

Bash can use text having only digits and a + or - sign as signed integers, if
you tell it to do that - test it before using it for very large numbers

Bash can do basic arithmetic +, -, *, /, % on integers by putting arithmetic

statements inside $(( )) - there are additional operators, see ARITHMETIC
EVALUATION on the bash manual page

The (()) syntax turns off file name globbing for * inside the (())
echo 3 + 4
echo $(( 3 + 4 ))
echo $(( 3.6 * 1.7 ))
echo 7 divided by 2 is $(( 7 / 2 )) with a remainder of $(( 7 % 2 ))
echo Rolling dice ... $(( $RANDOM % 6 + 1 )), $(( RANDOM % 6 + 1))
Lab 2 - diceroller.sh
Variables
Every process has memory-based storage to hold named data

A named data item is called a variable

Variables can hold any data as their value, but usually hold text data, aka strings

Variables are created by assigning data to

them, using =

It is important to not leave any spaces myvar=3

around the = sign variable2="string data"
vowels=a e i o u
The assigned text must be a single token for
bash, escape your spaces!
Variables
Since a variable is stored in process memory, it stays around until we get rid of it,
or the process ends

To access the data stored in a variable, use $variablename

Non-trivial variable names must be surrounded by { }, ordinary names do not

require them

Putting # at the start of a variable name tells bash you want the count of
characters in the variable, not the text from the variable

myvar=hello var[2]=silly name var[2]="silly name"

echo $myvar echo $var[2] echo ${var[2]}
echo ${#myvar} echo #var[2] echo ${#var[2]}
Lab 2 - improveddice.sh
Dynamic Data on the Command
Line
Most commands we run interactively use static data - data which has a fixed
value that we enter literally when we type the command

Sometimes you want to run a command using command line data that may not
be a fixed value - this is called using dynamic data

Getting data from a variable to put on the command line is a way to put
dynamic data on the command line

Bash can run a sub-shell to execute one or more commands and put the output
from the sub-shell onto the command line of another command

today=$(date +%A)
todaymessage="Today is $(date +%A)."
echo "Today is $today."
Lab 2 - welcome-example.sh
User Input

Bash can get user input and put it in a variable

The read command will wait for the user to type out a line of
text and press enter, then put whatever was typed into a
predefined variable named REPLY

You can specify a prompt, specify what variable or variables to

put the user data into, and there are other options

prompt="Enter 2 numbers "

read -p "Input? " myvar
read -p "$prompt" usernumber1 usernumber2
echo $myvar
echo "User gave us $usernumber1 and $usernumber2"
Lab 2 - arithmetic-demo.sh
Working With Strings

Many command line tools are available to parse and manipulate strings

grep (used to search for patterns in text)

tr (used to do trivial character substitutions in text)

cut (used to extract portions of text from input text data)

sed, awk - advanced text manipulation tools

expr index string searchtext will return a non-zero index value if searchtext is in string

See http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/string-manipulation.html for more pure bash string

manipulation techniques and information
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