xmlstarlet not working correct in mac

Question

I created a batch file for windows that executes some xmlstarlet commands. I want to write it as .sh file so that i can run it on mac. The problem is.. Some commands are working fine in windows but not in mac. It didn't show any error too. Eg.

**xml ed -L -d //intent-filter//category[@android:name='android.intent.category.LAUNCHER'] my_folder\AndroidManifest.xml**

In windows, above command deletes the mentioned xml tag. BUt it does nothing in mac. But the command

**xml sel -t -m //manifest -v //manifest/@package mim_apk_proj\AndroidManifest.xml**

is working fine in both mac and windows. I have installed xml tool. Checked /usr/local/bin. It has libxslt.dylib and libxml2.dylib. I dont know where the problem lies? Can someone help?

Answer 1

The quoting rules for bash (that's the shell on your mac, right?) are different from cmd.exe (the Windows shell), in particular, cmd.exe treats ' as a normal character while to bash it is a quoting character so it isn't passed to the program. In bash you therefore need to quote the 's as well:

xml ed -L -d //intent-filter//category[@android:name='android.intent.category.LAUNCHER'] my_folder\AndroidManifest.xml
# becomes
xml ed -L -d "//intent-filter//category[@android:name='android.intent.category.LAUNCHER'] my_folder\AndroidManifest.xml"
# or, since XPath treats both kinds of quotes identically you can also use
xml ed -L -d '//intent-filter//category[@android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER"] my_folder\AndroidManifest.xml'

The second fix is safer because it also prevents bash from doing any variable expansion if you use $, but the first fix has the advantage of working in Windows as well.