this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Programming

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Any ideas? I am attempting to write a script that uses sed.

If done this way it fails

  • rmdec="sed 's/..................$//'"
  • i1xmr=$(echo "$i1p/$apiresponse*1000" |bc -l |$rmdec)

But if i do it this way it works

  • i1xmr=$(echo "$i1p/$apiresponse*1000" |bc -l | sed 's/..................$//')
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have had some problems doing what you're trying to do. Replacing the variable with a function would work.

rmdec() { sed 's/...$//'; }

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Perfect. That did the trick. So when running a bash command like that putting it in a function keeps it from getting screwed up apparently

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're assigning rmdec to the output of sed. It should work if you wrap it as you did with i1xmr.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, my goal is to shorten that sed command to that variable. It seems like it would work, but nope. It throws errors

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It might be because it's a single string, and might work if you store it or expand it as an array. I think it would in Zsh, anyway.

But the response to use a function instead is probably wiser.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Strings work fine, the problem is the (single) quotes:

~ $ foo="echo 'hello world'"
~ $ for x in $foo; do echo $x; done
echo
'hello
world'
~ $ $foo
'hello world'
~ $ eval "$foo"
hello world

The splitting is by whitespace, so the single quotes remain in the arguments. Using eval (and double quotes to preven splitting), it gets processed correctly. That said, don't use eval; use functions or aliases instead.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yep, the function did the trick. My guess is it was being misread at execution as a variable and thats why it was breaking

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Your mistake is that after variable substitution bash does not handle quoted strings, i.e. it does not remove single quotes from sed command line. If you really need this to happen, you have to use eval:

i1xmr=$(echo "$i1p/$apiresponse*1000" | bc -l | eval $rmdec)

However using functions is a better solution in general. But in this particular case, I guess, you only need to change the bc's scale instead of using sed:

i1xmr=$(echo "scale=17; $i1p/$apiresponse*1000" | bc -l)

For better readability you may use heredoc instead of echo:

i1xmr=$( bc -l << EOF
scale=17
$i1p/$apiresponse*1000
EOF
)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Oh dear Lord, and see, this is why I do not code for a living. What I ended up doing is using a function like this

  • rmdec() { sed 's/..................$//'; }
  • i1xmr=$(echo "$i1p/$apiresponse*1000" |bc -l |rmdec)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Again, you don't need sed for this, simply set scale=2 or how many digits after decimal point you need. Also you missed ! in the shebang (#!/bin/bash or #!/bin/sh).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So I need five digits after the decimal point, but then when I do the multiplication, I only want four digits in total. I did move "scale=" to five and that made the sed command in rmdec much shorter, but its still needed. I thought i could add "length=4" but that throws an error.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Multiply before you divide to keep precision: 1000 * $i1p / $apiresponse

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Ah, that did the trick. Thanks

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

And again, using here-document greatly improves readability, like this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmm. I had a look at the example given. I see the idea, but would cat be the thing to use or would it be echo <<-EOF > "$file"?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You need cat because it reads stdin and prints it to stdout. echo does not read stdin, it prints its arguments.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have never used cat like that before. If you just ent cat abcd > file it says abcd doesnt exist but does create "file". I know you can cat contents of a file into another file but why the <<-EOF > file works is a bit beyond me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

cat does not create file, your shell does when you redirect the standard output with > file.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Alright, I modified it and formatted it. However, for whatever reason, the output HTML in /var/www/html/index.html does not keep the formatting and is all just left aligned as before. That's not really a problem, just more of a curiosity as to why it did not inherit the formatting of the input.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

When using "<<-", shell removes all tabs from the beginning of each line. So you have to use tabs for formatting inside your script and then spaces for HTML formatting, as in my example. Or use "<<" without dash to preserve tabs.