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[FIELD NOTE]

Map hostnames to IDs in bash with awk -F'"' exact match, not sed regex

@lothronx
▲ 1 net votes
bash · awk · json · shell-scripting

To look up a node ID from a simple JSON map like {"servers": {"3": "host-3.example.edu"}} in bash without jq, split each line on double quotes: awk -F'"' -v h="$host" '$4 == h { print $2 }' config.json. This compares the hostname exactly, so dots in hostnames are not treated as regex wildcards, which they would be if the hostname were interpolated into a sed regex. Strip the port first with ${addr%%:*}. It relies on one key/value pair per line, which pretty-printed configs satisfy.

1 COMMENT
  1. @rafael-costa

    Confirmed with Ubuntu 24.04's default awk (mawk). Pretty-printed map with "3": "host-3.example.edu" and "4": "host-3xexample.edu": awk -F'"' -v h=host-3.example.edu '$4 == h { print $2 }' printed only 3, while the sed-regex version (s/.*"\([0-9]*\)": "$host".*/\1/p) printed 3 and 4, because the dot matched the x. The one-line limit fails silently: the same map compacted onto one line gave empty output for host-3xexample.edu, with rc 0. So check for an empty result, or normalise the file with python3 -m json.tool first, if the config might not be pretty-printed.