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Old 11-17-2009, 09:52 PM   #1
Thelionroars
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How to display a file, omitting lines that contain a string?


What would be the simplest command/s to display a file, with lines containing a certain string omitted?

For example - I would like to display my GRUB file in a terminal in Ubuntu 9.04 (cat /boot/grub/menu.lst) but don't want to display the comments(#).
 
Old 11-17-2009, 09:59 PM   #2
ghostdog74
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awk, grep are 2 of them. read their docs and try to code them yourself first.
 
Old 11-17-2009, 10:20 PM   #3
Thelionroars
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<ghostdog74 thrusts fishing rod into thelionroars' hands>

Ok ok... a quick scan of the grep manpage showed me what I wanted (use the -v option). So:
Code:
cat /boot/grub/menu.lst | grep -v '#'
Thanks. Would your username be a reference to the film?
 
Old 11-17-2009, 10:51 PM   #4
ghostdog74
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Thelionroars View Post
So:
Code:
cat /boot/grub/menu.lst | grep -v '#'
good effort. note: no need cat. Its useless. many i have come across always do that. Just pass the file to grep. Next, you may have "#" as comment at the back of the line. if you do -v "#" , then you may omit an actual line.

Quote:
Would your username be a reference to the film?
yes.
 
Old 11-18-2009, 05:53 PM   #5
Thelionroars
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ghostdog74 View Post
note: no need cat. Its useless. many i have come across always do that. Just pass the file to grep.
Maybe its the Ubuntu permissions system, but the command won't work without cat, even with sudo. Without sudo, permission denied. With sudo, command not found. Maybe its different using a shell owned by root?

Quote:
Next, you may have "#" as comment at the back of the line. if you do -v "#" , then you may omit an actual line.
Good point. So I could use a caret (^) to specify that grep only selects lines that begin with the string -

cat /boot/grub/menu.lst | grep ^#

The material on regular expressions that I'm looking at also states that you can add an OR operator with | , but I'm not sure how to use this with grep?
 
Old 11-18-2009, 05:56 PM   #6
smeezekitty
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you can make it pause so you an actually read it by replacing cat with more. just a tip.
 
Old 11-18-2009, 06:43 PM   #7
ghostdog74
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i would use gawk instead

Code:
awk '!/^ +#/' file  # one or spaces in beginning, don't print
 
Old 11-18-2009, 06:51 PM   #8
smeezekitty
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ghostdog74 View Post
i would use gawk instead

Code:
awk '!/^ +#/' file  # one or spaces in beginning, don't print
the grep version looked cleaner.
 
Old 11-18-2009, 06:58 PM   #9
ghostdog74
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Quote:
Originally Posted by smeezekitty View Post
the grep version looked cleaner.
and so? awk can do a whole lot more.
 
Old 11-18-2009, 08:42 PM   #10
Thelionroars
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I see what you mean now by not needing cat - you give the file name as an argument to grep or awk and it goes to standard output, which by default is printing to the terminal. So to correct my grep usage -

grep -v ^# /boot/grub/menu.lst

No cat or pipes needed.
 
Old 01-21-2010, 08:11 AM   #11
Fabio Paolini
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As I recently learned a little about grep command and regular expressions, I would like to improve a bit the command above.
You can also skip the blank lines with
Code:
grep -E -v '^#|^ *$' <file>
The | character is a kind of 'and' operator and the string ^ *$ matches blank lines. At last, if I am right, the 'and' operator works just if the -E option is included.
 
Old 01-21-2010, 05:42 PM   #12
chrism01
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Actually, '|' is the 'OR' operator
 
Old 01-22-2010, 07:03 AM   #13
Fabio Paolini
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Quote:
Originally Posted by chrism01 View Post
Actually, '|' is the 'OR' operator
Yes, that is true, actually I said 'and' without thinking enough.
 
  


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