Question

Say I have a file (php as it happens), with a number of variable declarations:

$dbuser = 'fred';
$dppass = 'abc123';
$dhhost = '127.0.0.1';

What I want to do from a BASH script, is parse this file, identify the variables I need, and read their values into variables I can access from my BASH script.

Obviously, the above file being PHP, has other lines that I’m not interested in.

I can extract the info I need from the bash shell using the following command:

grep \$dbuser config.php.inc | grep -Po "\'.*\'" | cut -d \' -f 2

which neatly returns

fred

But when I try to add this to a bash script to put the output into a variable using backticks, as follows:

dbuser=`grep \$dbuser config.php.inc | grep -Po "\'.*\'" | cut -d \' -f 2`

my BASH script hangs at this point.

Why is this hanging, or, is there a better way of doing what I’m trying to achieve?

Answer 1

This will return text like var='value';

awk '
    match($1, /^\$([[:alnum:]_]+)=?/, m){
        gsub(/^[^=]+=[[:space:]]*/, "")
        print m[1] "=" $0
    }
' < file.php

You can eval the output.

update

This is a lot simpler than the above. I realized all you need to do is delete the first $ and remove the spaces around the =:

sed -e 's/\$//' -e 's/ *= */=/' file.php