Incrementing a variable inside a Bash loop

Question

I\'m trying to write a small script that will count entries in a log file, and I\'m incrementing a variable (USCOUNTER) which I\'m trying to use after the loop

Answer 1

USCOUNTER=$(grep -c "^US " "$FILE")

Answer 2

You are using USCOUNTER in a subshell, that's why the variable is not showing in the main shell.

Instead of cat FILE | while ..., do just a while ... done < $FILE. This way, you avoid the common problem of I set variables in a loop that's in a pipeline. Why do they disappear after the loop terminates? Or, why can't I pipe data to read?:

while read country _; do
  if [ "US" = "$country" ]; then
        USCOUNTER=$(expr $USCOUNTER + 1)
        echo "US counter $USCOUNTER"
  fi
done < "$FILE"

Note I also replaced the `` expression with a $().

I also replaced while read line; do country=$(echo "$line" | cut -d' ' -f1) with while read country _. This allows you to say while read var1 var2 ... varN where var1 contains the first word in the line, $var2 and so on, until $varN containing the remaining content.

Answer 3

You're getting final 0 because your while loop is being executed in a sub (shell) process and any changes made there are not reflected in the current (parent) shell.

Correct script:

while read -r country _; do
  if [ "US" = "$country" ]; then
        ((USCOUNTER++))
        echo "US counter $USCOUNTER"
  fi
done < "$FILE"

Answer 4

Incrementing a variable can be done like that:

  _my_counter=$[$_my_counter + 1]

Counting the number of occurrence of a pattern in a column can be done with grep

 grep -cE "^([^ ]* ){2}US"

-c count

([^ ]* ) To detect a colonne

{2} the colonne number

US your pattern

Answer 5

minimalist

counter=0
((counter++))
echo $counter

Answer 6

Using the following 1 line command for changing many files name in linux using phrase specificity:

find -type f -name '*.jpg' | rename 's/holiday/honeymoon/'

For all files with the extension ".jpg", if they contain the string "holiday", replace it with "honeymoon". For instance, this command would rename the file "ourholiday001.jpg" to "ourhoneymoon001.jpg".

This example also illustrates how to use the find command to send a list of files (-type f) with the extension .jpg (-name '*.jpg') to rename via a pipe (|). rename then reads its file list from standard input.