Need a grep expert

WetGeek

I want to filter the output of an eopkg li command so as to extract the Name and Dependencies from a list of all installed packages. Problem is, my career was in Windows development, and I have a limited understanding of grep syntax.

Specifically, I don't know how to include a newline into a command. In Windows, it would be \n. What would it be in Linux? (Multiple grep patterns are separated by newlines.) So, I'm looking for the Linux equivalent of the Windows expression: Name \n Dependencies

I'm pretty sure that will allow me to create the list I want, or it will get me to the next roadblock. If the latter, I'll ask my next question here. Thanks for any help with this!

Harvey

Confused at your goal, might just be wording that is throwing me off. eopkg li lists all installed packages it does not give you any relationship information. So if you are trying to see x is a dependency of y than eopkg li is not going to help you.

If however you just want a filtered list of installed packages names without their description, that is much easier:

eopkg li | cut -d " " -f 1 | tr '\n' ' ' > ~/InstalledPackages

You could then use that output on another system to make sure they have the same packages installed:
sudo eopkg install $(cat ~/InstalledPackages)

I should point out the above commands were provided by Justin years ago, I just kept it in docs because I thought it was neat.

Although it seems overkill to me, you'd be better off paying attention to what you wanted installed an writing a script for just that for fresh installs, which is what I do.

WetGeek

Harvey eopkg li lists all installed packages it does not give you any relationship information

Sorry, I forgot to write li -l. That's what I've been working with. I thought it would be a simple matter to filter Name and Dependencies from its output.

Harvey

Honestly I did not know li -l existed 😛

eopkg li -l | grep -E 'Name|Dependencies'

Will get you closer, example output:

Name: aa-lsm-hook, version: 0.1.4, release: 13
Dependencies: 
Name: aalib, version: 1.4.0_5, release: 8
Dependencies: ncurses glibc libx11 
Name: abireport, version: 1.0.11, release: 8
Dependencies: glibc 
Name: accounts-qml-module, version: 0.7, release: 2
Dependencies: qt5-declarative libstdc++ libaccounts-qt qt5-base glibc signond

But would require more filtering.

WetGeek

Harvey eopkg li -l | grep -E 'Name|Dependencies'

Ah, a simple "or". I should have thought of that. Although I probably would have tried & first. 😀 Thanks again for your help with this. I can pipe that result to less, and take a look at my list.

WetGeek

My next question is, "how do I represent a newline when doing a search-and-replace in Kate?" So far, I know that /n doesn't work. Neither does <LF>. I've loaded the result of that previous step into Kate, and I want to separate the entries by inserting a newline before every line that starts with Name.

Thus, instead of:
Name
Dependencies
Name
Dependencies
Name
Dependencies

I want to see:

Name
Dependencies

But I can't figure how to express a newline in the Replace textbox. Any ideas?

WetGeek

WetGeek But I can't figure how to express a newline in the Replace textbox.

As often happens, one of my searches turned up the answer I needed right after I asked that question here. I just needed to select "Escape sequences" from the drop-down under the Replace textbox. It workes wonderfully.

I was able to replace "Name" with "\nName" and my very long document is now quite easily readable.