Anybody good with bash scripting?

[TyphoidHippo]

I figure with all these members, there's gotta be at least one person who is good with bash scripting - whether or not I'll actually get their attention with this thread...I'm kinda doubtful - but it sure would be swell, since people here are generally much more friendly than the ones I could ask for help on *nix forums.

Basically, all I want to do is make a script that will read some variable definitions from one file and then go replace those variable instances in other files with said definitions from the first file.

Example:

***Definitions file***
definitions.src

%{APPNAME} SomeName
%{APPDESC} Some program that does something
%{AUTHOR} John Doe
%{DATE} 09-24-08

***File to be altered (before running the script)***
SomeName.cpp

//%{APPNAME}.cpp
//%{APPDESC}
//Created/revised by %{AUTHOR} on %{DATE}

***File to be altered (after running the script)***
SomeName.cpp

//SomeName.cpp
//Some program that does something
//Created/revised by John Doe on 09-24-08

Thanks in advance if anybody can help.

 

[Thurgood]

New visitor to this thread but that sounds cool. Wish I could help. i will looki into it. Be well All.

 

[fraserhutch]

I don't know that I would solve this with bash - what you want is sed/awk, or perl.

 

[TyphoidHippo]

I don't know that I would solve this with bash - what you want is sed/awk, or perl.

Hey, thanks, man. I actually ended up just switching to Windows on my desktop because I have to use Windows-only apps (Visual Studio, 3DS MAX) with their own proprietary formats for my classes now ....and, as we all know, the built-in scripting in Windows is just awesome, lol. although... it is nice to be able to script with Auto-it again, as there is, sadly, nothing quite like it for Linux (and I looked, really hard, for something similar for years).

Anyway, I already scripted up a nice little Auto-it script that does it for me, but thanks anyway!

 

[dgatwood]

I wish you'd posted in the computer forum where I would have seen it. This would be about a 15 second script. I recommend that you not use all those weird symbols in the definition file, though. Just make the file be:

TERM value to insert
NAME John Doe
DATE June 9, 1969

I probably wouldn't do this with awk. It could probably do it, but I think you'd be working around its design quite a bit. A shell script with a lot of sed expressions would probably be easier, e.g. something like this:

#!/bin/sh

SOURCEFILE="$1"
DESTFILE="$2"
DEFSFILE="$3"

# Capture the definitions file and the source file into variables
DEFS="$(cat "$DEFSFILE")"
DATA="$(cat "$SOURCEFILE")"

# Process each definition in the definitions file.
while [ "x$DEFS" != "x" ] ; do

# First, split the content out one line at a time.
LINE="$(echo "$DEFS" | head -n 1)"
DEFS="$(echo "$DEFS" | tail -n "+2")"

# Grab the first word, splitting on the first space.
TOKEN="$(echo "$LINE" | sed 's/ .*//g')"

# Look for one or more nonspace characters followed by a space,
# anchored to the start of the line. Delete everything up to and including
# this space. In effect, this is the inverse of the previous line.
VALUE="$(echo "$LINE" | sed 's/^[^ ][^ ]* //')"

# If both the token and the value are nonempty, hack up the data
# with them.
if [ "x$TOKEN" != "x" -a "x$VALUE" ] ; then
DATA="$(echo "$DATA" | sed "s/$TOKEN/$VALUE/g")"
fi

# End of the while loop.
done

# Write the data out to the destination file.
echo "$DATA" > "$DESTFILE"


Note that this is completely untested and probably contains a fair number of typos, but you get the basic idea, anyway. I know it's too late to help you, but hopefully this post will at least help somebody trying to figure something out in the future.

 

[TyphoidHippo]

Dang, nice, man! "I must spread some reputation around before giving it to Dgatwood again"

P.S. We have a computer forum?! General computing or the computer recording and soundcards forum? If the former, I must be pretty dense, because I can't find it.