2

I have a file formated like below:

436541,000454056,Smith,john,jsmith,[email protected]

I want to extract out ",jsmith" and write it to another file "test.txt".

So I use:

grep -o '\,[a-z][a-z0-9]{1,7}' source.txt > test.txt

from the command line and it works fine.

when I use it from a shell script the test.txt file is empty

#!/bin/bash
grep -o '\,[a-z][a-z0-9]{1,7}' source.txt > test.txt

any suggestions?

5
  • 3
    Why does type grep return? Do you have an alias grep='grep -E' or grep=egrep? {1,7} is extended RE syntax only recognised with -E. Oct 19, 2015 at 16:27
  • type grep grep is aliased to `/bin/grep -E'
    – Tony
    Oct 19, 2015 at 16:34
  • Aliases are disabled in scripts, so just fill in the complete command you see in set -x mode into the script.
    – schily
    Oct 19, 2015 at 16:39
  • 1
    And don't do alias grep='grep -E', that's silly. Oct 19, 2015 at 16:40
  • 1
    Why grep but cut -d, -f5?
    – Costas
    Oct 19, 2015 at 17:17

2 Answers 2

2

By default, grep uses Basic Regular Expressions (BRE) which don't support {N}. If it works on the commandline, you most probably have grep aliased to grep -E or grep -P. You can check by running

alias | grep grep

Aliases are not enabled in scripts. As explained in man bash:

Aliases are not expanded when the shell is not interactive, unless  the
expand_aliases  shell option is set using shopt.

So, in a non-interactive shell, which is what you get when you run a script, aliases won't work. You have two options, either enable the aliases explicitly in your script and then source your ~/.bashrc file to get the alias definitions (there's no need to escape the ,, by the way):

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s expand_aliases
source ~/.bashrc
grep -o ',[a-z][a-z0-9]{1,7}' source.txt > test.txt

Or, far simpler, use grep -E in the script itself:

#!/bin/bash
grep -Eo ',[a-z][a-z0-9]{1,7}' source.txt > test.txt

You might also want to consider tools like awk that are designed to work on field-delimited data though. Chances are they will make your life much simpler.

0

If your text file has the same structure you could also use awk

awk -F"," '{print $5}' INPUTFILE.txt >> test.txt 

There is also cut as Costas mentioned in the comments

cut -d"," -f5 INPUTFILE.txt >> test.txt 

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