How do I grab an INI value within a shell script?

Question

I have a parameters.ini file, such as:

[parameters.ini]
    database_user    = user
    database_version = 20110611142248

I want to read in and use the database version specified in the parameters.ini file from within a bash shell script so I can process it.

#!/bin/sh    
# Need to get database version from parameters.ini file to use in script    
php app/console doctrine:migrations:migrate $DATABASE_VERSION

How would I do this?

Answer 1

Sed one-liner, that takes sections into account. Example file:

[section1]
param1=123
param2=345
param3=678

[section2]
param1=abc
param2=def
param3=ghi

[section3]
param1=000
param2=111
param3=222

Say you want param2 from section2. Run the following:

sed -nr "/^\[section2\]/ { :l /^param2[ ]*=/ { s/.*=[ ]*//; p; q;}; n; b l;}" ./file.ini

will give you

def

Answer 2

Some of the answers don't respect comments. Some don't respect sections. Some recognize only one syntax (only ":" or only "="). Some Python answers fail on my machine because of differing captialization or failing to import the sys module. All are a bit too terse for me.

So I wrote my own, and if you have a modern Python, you can probably call this from your Bash shell. It has the advantage of adhering to some of the common Python coding conventions, and even provides sensible error messages and help. To use it, name it something like myconfig.py (do NOT call it configparser.py or it may try to import itself,) make it executable, and call it like

value=$(myconfig.py something.ini sectionname value)

Here's my code for Python 3.5 on Linux:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# Last Modified: Thu Aug  3 13:58:50 PDT 2017
"""A program that Bash can call to parse an .ini file"""

import sys
import configparser
import argparse

if __name__ == '__main__':
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="A program that Bash can call to parse an .ini file")
    parser.add_argument("inifile", help="name of the .ini file")
    parser.add_argument("section", help="name of the section in the .ini file")
    parser.add_argument("itemname", help="name of the desired value")
    args = parser.parse_args()

    config = configparser.ConfigParser()
    config.read(args.inifile)
    print(config.get(args.section, args.itemname))

Answer 3

one of more possible solutions

dbver=$(sed -n 's/.*database_version *= *\([^ ]*.*\)/\1/p' < parameters.ini)
echo $dbver

Answer 4

All of the solutions I've seen so far also hit on commented out lines. This one didn't, if the comment code is ;:

awk -F '=' '{if (! ($0 ~ /^;/) && $0 ~ /database_version/) print $2}' file.ini

Answer 5

This uses the system perl and clean regular expressions:

cat parameters.ini | perl -0777ne 'print "$1" if /\[\s*parameters\.ini\s*\][\s\S]*?\sdatabase_version\s*=\s*(.*)/'

Answer 6

Just include your .ini file into bash body:

File example.ini:

DBNAME=test
DBUSER=scott
DBPASSWORD=tiger

File example.sh

#!/bin/bash
#Including .ini file
. example.ini
#Test
echo "${DBNAME}   ${DBUSER}  ${DBPASSWORD}"