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SHELL SCRIPTING: accessing individual lines

Started by matrisking Jun 2, 2006 at 3:15 PM 2 replies 800+ views

Original Post

Jun 2, 2006 at 3:15 PM

Hi all, I'm writing a bash script and I have a file that is just a long list of file names, with one file on each line. I would like to select an individual line and return the filename on that line (and then proceed to delete the line from the file). I'm still learning about shell programming and I'm not sure if there is a simple command out there to do this or if its going to require some involved programming. If anyone knows of a simple, elegant way to do this, I'd really appreciate the help! Thanks a lot!

baldurk

Jun 2, 2006 at 4:31 PM

I am an awful, awful, awful scripter so please don't use this, but it works:

grep -n '.\?' $FILENAME | egrep '^'"$LINENO" | sed -e '{s%^[0-9]\+:%%}'

EDIT: there is also probably a very easy simple way to do it.

bytecoder

Jun 2, 2006 at 5:03 PM

It'd probably be a lot easier to just use a programming language; this took me about a minute:

#!/usr/bin/pythonimport sysnames = open(sys.argv[1]).readlines()line = int(sys.argv[2])print names[line-1]del names[line-1]open(sys.argv[1], "w").write("".join(names))

edit:
Whoops. Darned python and its not-stripping-newline-off behavior :/

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