Issue
I have a file input.txt which stores information in KEY:VALUE form. I'm trying to read GOOGLE_URL from this input.txt which prints only http because the seperator is :. What is the problem with my grep command and how should I print the entire URL.
SCRIPT
$> cat script.sh
#!/bin/bash
URL=`grep -e '\bGOOGLE_URL\b' input.txt | awk -F: '{print $2}'`
printf " $URL \n"
INPUT_FILE
$> cat input.txt
GOOGLE_URL:https://www.google.com/
OUTPUT
https
DESIRED_OUTPUT
https://www.google.com/
Solution
Since there are multiple : in your input, getting $2 will not work in awk because it will just give you 2nd field. You actually need an equivalent of cut -d: -f2- but you also need to check key name that comes before first :.
This awk should work for you:
awk -F: '$1 == "GOOGLE_URL" {sub(/^[^:]+:/, ""); print}' input.txt
https://www.google.com/
Or this non-regex awk approach that allows you to pass key name from command line:
awk -F: -v k='GOOGLE_URL' '$1==k{print substr($0, length(k FS)+1)}' input.txt
Or using gnu-grep:
grep -oP '^GOOGLE_URL:\K.+' input.txt
https://www.google.com/
Answered By - anubhava