Tadek’s Blog

Writing some shell scripts I needed to do some a little fancier variable substitution than the standard shell offers. The heavyweight solution would be to write a perl one-liner, but this is, well…, heavyweight?

Here’s a couple of patterns I used:

• --parameter=$(sed -re 's/ /,/g' -e 's/(^|,)/\1file:/g' <<<$INPUT) - replaces spaces with commas and prepends file to every file.
• --parameter=$(awk '{split($0, a, /@/); printf "%s-?????-of-%05d", a[1], a[2]} <<<$INPUT)'
- replaces file@5 with file-?????-of-00005
• --parameter=$(awk '{sub(/.*:/, ""); print $0}' <<<$INPUT) - removes everything before the colon.