Ubuntu – Use sed command to apply a condition to check if a pattern has been matched

bashcommand linesed

I am searching for the string ::=BEGIN and I want to apply a condition to check if the word has been found.

So, what I mean is something along these lines: 

if (sed command does find a match for "::=BEGIN")
then i=1 
else i=0

Also, I want the 1 (for yes found) and 0 (not found) to be put into the variable "i".

Please help me out. Also provide a explanation to the solution! Thanks!

Best Answer

grep does that job well enough. 

$ echo "::=BEGIN" > testfile1.txt

$ grep "::=BEGIN" -q testfile1.txt && echo "FOUND"
FOUND

$ grep "::=BEGIN" -q testfile1.txt && echo "FOUND" || echo "NOTFOUND"
FOUND

$ grep "whever" -q testfile1.txt && echo "FOUND" || echo "NOTFOUND"
NOTFOUND

What the code does is simply running a quiet search within subshell. && , or logical AND operand, checks if the first command succeeded, and if it did, then it runs echo "FOUND" . || checks if that echo has been run, i.e., if we found anything. Second echo runs only if the first command failed.

Here's an awk version:

$ awk '{i="NOTFOUND";if($0~/::=BEGIN/) i="FOUNDIT";exit } END { print i}' testfile1.txt
FOUNDIT

$ awk '{i="NOTFOUND";if($0~/whatevs/) i="FOUNDIT";exit } END { print i}' testfile1.txt
NOTFOUND

Basic idea here is to set i to NOTFOUND, and if we find the string - change it to FOUNDIT . At the end after the first set of has finished processing file, we will print i, and it will tell us if we found something or not.

Edit: In the comment you mentioned that you want to place the result into a variable. Shell already provides a variable that reports exit status of the previous command, $0. Exit status 0 means success, everything else - fail. For instance,

$ grep "::=BEGIN" -q testfile1.txt  
$ echo $?
0

If you want to use exit status in a variable, you can do it like so : MYVAR=$(echo $?). Remember , $? report exit status of previous command. So you must use this right after the grep command.

If you want to still use my earlier awk and grep one-liners, you can use same trick MYVAR=$() and place whatever command you want between the braces. The output will get assigned to variable MYVAR.

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