So, recently at work, I found myself knee deep in… scripts…
Most of my scripts had ugly positional parameters/arguments (you know, $1 was the value for this, $2 was the input for that)… So, I dug up getopt… But then I quickly spiralled down the time-sucking rabbit hole of trying to automate some other bits, like being able to print the “usage” by “simply” plucking out all the options given to getopt in the first place…
For anyone familiar with regular expressions, the need to escape characters, that might otherwise be construed as some “special command”, is a regular affair…
sed posed a particular challenge for me when attempting to escape variables that are used as a replacement string. So, to cut the long story short, after 8 hours of trying, testing and re-testing, I finally got the solution…
In a bash shell, try the following:
TESTSTRING='\/12345678\90!@#$%^&*()-_=+{}[];:",.<>? `~abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
sed "s#\([^[:alnum:]]\)#\\\\\1#g"<<<$TEST
Otherwise, in a script, try the following:
TESTSTRING='\/12345678\90!@#$%^&*()-_=+{}[];:",.<>? `~abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
TESTSTRING=`echo $TESTSTRING|sed 's#\([^[:alnum:]]\)#\\\\\1#g'
WARNING: This does not work with intended backreferences (e.g. \1, \2, … \9, etc.) as the leading backslash will also be escaped (see the \9 in the tests above).
NOTE: The single-quote character was not part of the tests as I could not find a way to escape that as part of the variable assignment.
So, my Ubuntu LTS 18.04 decided to have a brain fart during a “routine” system update just past midnight on Saturday morning… Rebooted the modem, switches, VM, VM host… nada…
With the ‘net down, I could not seem to see the list of update details, nor try and roll anything back… Worst yet, I was actually doing work (which needs a ‘net connection)… So the troubleshooting ensued…
Troubleshooting using my work laptop via my handphone hotspot was no fun… So, four-and-a-half hours later, I retired, disgruntled at not solving the issue (and also having to do three rounds of laundry, get woken up a mere 15 minutes later by my young daughter who wet her bed, and get awakened again 30 minutes after that due to one inconsiderate neighbour’s noisy pet birds – but that’s a totally different story and I digress)…
Just a few days ago, I had applied for a free 12-month trial from TPG (Singapore’s fourth telco), so at 10AM in the morning, I dragged myself out of bed, went to church, and then picked up the TPG SIM card… All this to use in a Huawei E3372-607 USB LTE/4G modem (together with a high-gain indoor antenna) purchased nearly two years ago that was meant to fix this exact situation (i.e. be a back-up Internet link).
