On 17 April 2013 01:29, SebA <spah at syntec.co.uk> wrote:

Using Jeremy's amazing example here http://lists.xymon.com/pipermail/xymon/2013-January/036615.html I'm trying to do something a little simpler...

Yeah, simpler is good. I wouldn't call my example "amazing", instead it's "complicated", or even "hackgly". Actually, I'm amazed it works!

log:`exec 2>/dev/null; F=/path/to/file/log.log; T=/tmp/substitutedlog.log;

C=$(sed 's/debug:.*/DEBUG LINE DETECTED AND REPLACED/' $F > $T); echo $T`:1024

Yup.

But /usr/share/xymon-client/logs/xymonclient.log gets this:

sh: -c: line 0: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `'' sh: -c: line 1: syntax error: unexpected end of file

I'm fairly sure the problem is the colon in "debug:". The Xymon client-side binary logfetch parses the log line from /tmp/logfetch.$HOSTNAME.cfg. The first thing it does is to split the line on the colon delimiter, into three parts, the last one being the max log message size. The logfetch program doesn't process any escapes or quoting, and only cares about the colons.

In my post to which you linked, I mentioned this problem. I handled it by putting creating a quote using printf from a hex representation, put it in a variable ($Z), and used that in my commands.

So this might stop the errors, and let the full command parse correctly:

log:exec 2>/dev/null; COLON=$(printf "\x3a"); F=/path/to/file/log.log; T=/tmp/substitutedlog.log;C=$(sed "s/debug${COLON}.*/DEBUG LINE DETECTED AND REPLACED/" $F > $T); echo $T:1024

This could be considered an obscure way of quoting, so I could get the colon into the grep parameter. Unlike grep, GNU sed can use quoted hex to represent arbitrary characters, so you might be able to get away with this:

log:exec 2>/dev/null; F=/path/to/file/log.log; T=/tmp/substitutedlog.log;C=$(sed "s/debug\x3a.*/DEBUG LINE DETECTED AND REPLACED/" $F > $T); echo $T:1024

In bash, the same \xnn format is expanded in strings of the form $'...', so this can be used if you weren't using sed to do pattern matching. For example: grep $'debug\x3a.*' > /tmp/tmpfile.

I'm not sure why you're using C=$() rather than just the commands - probably just a hang-over from my example. There's unlikely to be any output to put into $C, and you don't use it anyway. I had it in my post because I wanted to do some calculations with it. So you can simplify this to be:

log:exec 2>/dev/null; F=/path/to/file/log.log; T=/tmp/substitutedlog.log;sed "s/debug\x2a.*/DEBUG LINE DETECTED AND REPLACED/" $F > $T; echo $T:1024

In fact, this is almost simple enough that variables don't aid maintainability, so I'd probably go with this, which is easier for a sysadmin to grok IMHO:

log:sed "s/debug\x2a.*/DEBUG LINE DETECTED AND REPLACED/" /path/to/file/log.log > /tmp/substitutedlog.log 2>/dev/null; echo /tmp/substitutedlog.log:1024

J