Question

I have a bunch of web.config files each possibly containing a connection string to a database like this:-

<add name="MyConnectionString" connectionString="Data Source=myserver;Initial Catalog=mydb;Persist Security Info=False;User ID=myuser;Password=secret" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />

What I want to do is grep the User ID=myuser;Password=secret part out of the line if it exists.

I cannot assume that password is the last property in the connection string, there may be other properties following it. So basically the password will always end with " or ;.

Using cygwin I can search the files like this:-

find /cygdrive/c/inetpub/wwwroot/ -iname 'web.config' -printf '%p\0' | xargs -0 grep -i "password="

How would i improve the grep part to retrieve only the username and password instead of the entire line ??

I could then pipe it into sort -u to get an unique list of usernames and passwords in use.

Answer 1

You can use grep with the -P flag to use Perl’s regular-expression engine, and the -o flag to return only the matching parts of the input:

grep -Po '(User ID|Password)=[^;"]*' web.config

This will return the following, considering your sample input:

User ID=myuser
Password=secret

Give your existing command, it would be something like:

find /cygdrive/c/inetpub/wwwroot/ -iname 'web.config' -printf '%p\0' | xargs -0 grep -Poi '(User ID|Password)=[^;"]*'