Did this million times already, but this time it's not working I try to grep "$TITLE" from a file. on command line it's working, "$TITLE" variable is not empty, but when i run the script it finds nothing
*title contains more than one word
echo "$TITLE"
cat PAGE.$TEMP.2 | grep "$TITLE"
what i've tried:
echo "cat PAGE.$TEMP.2 | grep $TITLE"
to see if title is not empty and file name is actually there
Are you sure that $TITLE does not have leading or trailing whitespace which is not in the file? Your fix with the string would strip out whitespace before execution, so it would not see it.
For example, with a file containing 'Line one':
/home/user1> TITLE=' one '
/home/user1> grep "$TITLE" text.txt
/home/user1> cat text.txt | grep $TITLE
Line one
Try echo "<$TITLE>", or echo "$TITLE"|od -xc which sould enable you to spot errant chars.
This command
echo "cat PAGE.$TEMP.2 | grep $TITLE"
echoes a string that starts with 'cat'. It does not run a command. You would want
echo "$( cat PAGE.$TEMP.2 | grep $TITLE )"
although that is identical in functionality to the simpler
cat PAGE.$TEMP.2 | grep $TITLE
And as pointed out by others, there is no need to pipe a single file using cat; grep can read from files just fine:
grep "$TITLE" "PAGE.$TEMP.2"
(Your default behavior should be to quote parameter expansions, unless you can show it is incorrect to do so.)
Works for me:
~> cat test.dat
abc
cda
xyz
~> export GRP=cda
~> cat test.dat | grep $GRP
cda
Edit:
Also the proper way to use grep is:
~> grep $GRP test.dat
I had similar problem yet it was caused by '~' in the path not being expanded correctly. I needed to use $HOME instead within the bash script. Then all good.
grepthe file with the value? Maybe the title really isn't in the file."$TITLE", the second time you don't.