Linux – Shell Script output indentation

formatlinuxshellunix

I want to call a shell-script / application inside another script. Every line of the contained script should be indented by 2 spaces. Is this possible?

The output should look something like this.

I'm the main-scripts' output.
  I'm a second script, called inside the main-script.
  Every line of my output is indented by 2 spaces.
  This is not implemented inside of me, but in the main-script
  as I should also be called outside of the main-script and then
  my output shouldn't be indented.
Thats all from the second script.

Is this possible and how?

Best Answer

You could use sed or awk to do this. For example in your main script you could do:

# execute the command and pipe to sed
second-script | sed 's/\(.*\)/  \1/'

The above sed command simply prepends two spaces to each line of output from second-script.

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Linux – Re-indent shell script

Emacs can do that:

load the file into Emacs
press Ctrl-space at the top of the file
move the cursor to the bottom of the file
press Alt-X and type untabify then return
press Alt-X and type indent-region then return

This will get rid of tabs and indent everything properly.

If you need to do this more often and do not use Emacs as your editor, you might want to pack it all into a script:

#!/usr/bin/emacs --script

(setq require-final-newline 'visit)

(defun indent-files (files)
  (cond (files
         (find-file (car files))
         (untabify (point-min) (point-max))
         (indent-region (point-min) (point-max))
         (save-buffer)
         (kill-buffer)
         (indent-files (cdr files)))))

(indent-files command-line-args-left)

;; EOF ;;

Reading output of shell command in awk script

Figured it out, but please feel free to add better answers

cmd = "dig +short -x " ;
cmd ip_address | getline hostname;
close(cmd)

Then I can use the hostname anywhere in the script.

Best Answer

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Linux – Re-indent shell script

Reading output of shell command in awk script

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