Question

Hey I try to write a littel bash script. This should copy a dir and all files in it. Then it should search each file and dir in this copied dir for a String (e.g @ForTestingOnly) and then this save the line number. Then it should go on and count each { and } as soon as the number is equals it should save againg the line number. => it should delete all the lines between this 2 numbers.
I’m trying to make a script which searchs for all this annotations and then delete the method which is directly after this ano.
Thx for help…

so far I have:

echo "please enter dir"
read dir
newdir="$dir""_final"
cp -r $dir $newdir 
cd $newdir

grep -lr -E '@ForTestingOnly' * | xargs sed -i 's/@ForTestingOnly//g'

now with grep I can search and replace the @ForTestingOnly anot. but I like to delete this and the following method…

Answer 1

Give this a try. It’s oblivious to braces in comments and literals, though, as David Gelhar warned. It only finds and deletes the first occurrence of the “@ForTestingOnly” block (under the assumption that there will only be one anyway).

#!/bin/bash
find . -maxdepth 1 | while read -r file
do
    open=0 close=0
    # start=$(sed -n '/@ForTestingOnly/{=;q}' "$file")
    while read -r line
    do
        case $line in
            *{*) (( open++ )) ;;
            *}*) (( close++ ));;
             '') : ;;    # skip blank lines
              *) # these lines contain the line number that the sed "=" command printed
                 if (( open == close ))
                 then 
                     break
                 fi
                 ;;
        esac
             # split braces onto separate lines dropping all other chars
             # print the line number once per line that contains either { or }
    # done < <(sed -n "$start,$ { /[{}]/ s/\([{}]\)/\1\n/g;ta;b;:a;p;=}" "$file")
    done < <(sed -n "/@ForTestingOnly/,$ { /[{}]/ s/\([{}]\)/\1\n/g;ta;b;:a;p;=}" "$file")
    end=$line
    # sed -i "${start},${end}d" "$file"
    sed -i "/@ForTestingOnly/,${end}d" "$file"
done

Edit: Removed one call to sed (by commenting out and replacing a few lines).

Edit 2:

Here’s a breakdown of the main sed line:

sed -n "/@ForTestingOnly/,$ { /[{}]/ s/\([{}]\)/\1\n/g;ta;b;:a;p;=}" "$file"

• -n – only print lines when explicitly requested
• /@ForTestingOnly/,$ – from the line containing “@ForTestingOnly” to the end of the file
• s/ ... / ... /g perform a global (per-line) substitution
• \( ... \) – capture
• [{}] – the characters that appear in the list bewteen the square brackets
• \1\n – substitute what was captured plus a newline
• ta – if a substitution was made, branch to label “a”
• b – branch (no label means “to the end and begin the per-line cycle again for the next line) – this branch functions as an “else” for the ta, I could have used T instead of ta;b;:a, but some versions of sed don’t support T
• :a – label “a”
• p – print the line (actually, print the pattern buffer which now consists of possibly multiple lines with a “{” or “}” on each one)
• = – print the current line number of the input file

The second sed command simply says to delete the lines starting at the one that has the target string and ending at the line found by the while loop.

The sed command at the top which I commented out says to find the target string and print the line number it’s on and quit. That line isn’t necessary since the main sed command is taking care of starting in the right place.

The inner whileloop looks at the output of the main sed command and increments counters for each brace. When the counts match it stops.

The outer while loop steps through all the files in the current directory.