Parsing OSX UNIX command results which print in multiple lines

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

from the CLI on a Mac, if you type

networksetup -listallnetworkservices

then you get results in a multi-line paragraph that look something like this:

networksetup -listallnetworkservices
An asterisk (*) denotes that a network service is disabled.
Wi-Fi
Display Ethernet
Bluetooth DUN
Thunderbolt Ethernet
Display FireWire
Bluetooth PAN
Thunderbolt Bridge

I need to capture each of the network services reported and add that to either a variable or an array.

Problem #1 is that first sentence. I don't wish to capture it but DO wish to capture everything else.

Problem #2 is that cut -d, cut -c and awk '{ print $x }' are all failing because they only appear to scan results form the first line, not the others that follow.

Not sure if this is a job for sed or perl, but not super good with either of those commands and their syntax. Open to yer thoughts, oh wise ones.

Yours Truly,
The Mac Dweeb

2

Not sure I understand. You say awk doesn't recognize lines? What's the awk record separator you're using? What's the result of

networksetup -listallnetworkservices | awk '{print NR, NF}'
1 Like
3 
networksetup -listallnetworkservices | awk 'NR>1'
1 Like
4

@RudiC - I'm not familiar with either NF or NR. I'm using something like

networksetup -listallnetworkservices | awk '{print $11-$20}'

and it's returning a lot of zeros. Your example only returns numbers as well:

1 10
2 1
3 2
4 2
5 1
6 1
7 2

I'm looking for the alphanumeric results but at least we now know the bnumber of spaces as delimiters.... :slight_smile:

@Aia - Your code DID return alphanumeric, but omitted the line items with no spaces in their name like "Wi-Fi" or "Ethernet".

---------- Post updated at 01:19 PM ---------- Previous update was at 01:06 PM ----------

Houston: we found a solution.

networksetup -listallnetworkservices | awk 'NR>1'
Wi-Fi
Display Ethernet
Bluetooth DUN
Thunderbolt Ethernet
Display FireWire
Bluetooth PAN
Thunderbolt Bridge

Thank you both for your help!

5

Sorry I meant NR>1 and somehow I interpolated an F instead of a R.
NF means Number of Fields
NR means Number of Records (normally lines)
Glad you found the same solution. I corrected it in the previous post.

6

Appreciate the follow up. The issue now is a bit more devious: setting an array with these values doesn't know how to break up the resulting text! Perhaps another problem for another thread, perhaps not.

Here's the original code:

networksetup -listallnetworkservices | awk 'NR>1'
Wi-Fi
Display Ethernet
Bluetooth DUN
Thunderbolt Ethernet
Display FireWire
Bluetooth PAN
Thunderbolt Bridge

Now, if I set a variable and then print those results to that variable, I get a series of words that aren't parsed by LINE. First, the variable:

services=`networksetup -listallnetworkservices | awk 'NR>1'`

Then showing the results:

echo $services
Wi-Fi Display Ethernet Bluetooth DUN Thunderbolt Ethernet Display FireWire Bluetooth PAN Thunderbolt Bridge

All those spaces essentially defeat the initial reason I needed this list in the first place! I need individual entries for each line, added into the array: Wi-Fi, Display Ethernet, Bluetooth DUN, Thunderbolt Ethernet, etc.

Meh.

7

If your shell supports it:

IFS=$'\n' device=($(networksetup -listallnetworkservices | awk 'NR>1'))

Now you can access each elements of the array:

for d in ${device[@]}; do echo "$d"; done
Bluetooth DUN
Thunderbolt Ethernet
Display Ethernet
Display FireWire
Wi-Fi
Bluetooth PAN
Thunderbolt Bridge

How many elements?

echo ${#device[@]}
7
8

had no idea about IFS but will certainly dig into that now, thank you! the code is working on my mac and i'm loving it. appreciate it.

---------- Post updated 12-02-15 at 09:31 AM ---------- Previous update was 12-01-15 at 03:43 PM ----------

had no idea about IFS but will certainly dig into that now, thank you! the code is working on my mac and i'm loving it. appreciate it.