If you are using awk with a relatively indexed NF variable (number of fields), and get an error like below, this is because the input being parsed does not have the number of fields expected. awk: run time error: negative field index $-1 The root problem is the awk expression was expecting a certain number … Bash: resolving awk run time error, negative field index
If you have multiple values coming through the Bash input pipeline, it can be difficult to process these into a complex, formatted set of arguments unless you use intermediate temporary files. But one way to neatly put together a complex set of arguments from an input pipeline with multiple values is to use awk printf … Bash: using multiple values from an input pipeline to construct and execute a command
YAML is a popular syntax for configuration, and it is common to have certificate definitions embedded in these files. But since the cert is typically Base64 PEM encoded, it means you can’t easily view its attributes (subject, expiration date, etc) and so you are left with the manual task of copy-pasting it out, saving as … Bash: Examining each certificate in a yaml file using sed and openssl
If you are in the middle of a text processing pipeline, and need to insert a shell or environment variable into the output of awk, you can use the “-v” flag. Here are two files containing animal classifications: $ echo -e “shark=fish\ndolphin=mammal” > ocean.txt $ echo -e “dog=mammal\neagle=bird” > land.txt By passing the loop variable … Bash: Using shell or environment variables in awk output
awk is a powerful utility for text processing, but the command itself is surrounded by single quotes and unfortunately does not allow you to escape single quotes within the output. To workaround this, you can represent the single quote as its hexidecimal escape code “\x27”. $ echo -e “name=Ben\nname=Jerry” | awk -F’=’ ‘{ printf(“insert into … Linux: Outputting single quotes in awk output
The typical usage for xargs is feeding it multiple lines of input, and having it run commands using each line as an argument. But there are other cases when you have a single line separated by a delimiter or even a list of optionally quoted args, and I’ll show in this article how to handle … Bash: Running command on quoted list of parameters using xargs