Find and delete lines in .desktop files

[bin]

.desktop files contain loads and loads of lines that are not needed.

e.g:-
GenericName[es]=Navegador web
Comment[ca]=Accedeix a Internet
Name[fr]=Nouvelle fenêtre

ad nauseam - take a look at the google-chrome.desktop attached and you'll see what I mean.

I don't need any of these language entries and in the past I used to manually clean up those that I used the most to improve execution times. That was back in the days of a 486 with 500mb RAM and an 80gb hard drive!!!!

Now, I have tried using various combinations of sed to find and remove these but I keep running into the same problem and that is the [ ]s which are seen as regex entries. Obviously what I want to do is find any line that contains Name[anything]= or Comment[anything]= and so on and delete the line.
This would leave lines like
Comment=Access the Internet intact - which is what I want.

I have searched for finding lines with variables or wildcards but keep stumbling on the square brackets. Anyone got any ideas please? I have tried various find utilities but this needs to be programmatic to handle the number of files involved.

Thanx - bin

[chris]

Code: Select all

grep -v '.*\[.*\]=' textmaker-free18.desktop

[/size]

will print ONLY lines NOT containing:
Something[something]= from the file textmaker-free18.desktop
Note the \ escaping [ and ], and .* for any-length string

[bin]

Code: Select all

grep -v '.*\[.*\]=' textmaker-free18.desktop

[/size]

will print ONLY lines NOT containing:
Something[something]= from the file textmaker-free18.desktop
Note the \ escaping [ and ], and .* for any-length string

Excellent - find what you're not looking for! No wonder I struggle with this stuff!

From there it's just a quick leap to

Code: Select all

sed -i /'.*\[.*\]=/d' sol.desktop

Job done - now for the brave bit

Code: Select all

sudo sed -i /'.*\[.*\]=/d' *.desktop

Thanks very much chris!

[chris]

A safer way to do what you want:

Code: Select all

for i in *.desktop; do cp "$i" "$i.backup"; grep -v '.*\[.*\]=' "$i.backup" > "$i"; done

And then restart to make sure your "new" .desktop files are working. Only then delete the .backup files

[bin]

Good thinking.

I was puzzled by the use of grep but a bit more digging with a relevant example makes it a lot clearer. Thanks again for assisting my little grey cell!

If anyone is reading this and wondering what I'm on about - please see the before and after attached.

221 lines down to 25 lines to be read each time it is used.

[dai_trying]

I tried it when I first read this post, and it sure makes editing .desktop files easier! Thank you both

[chris]

As an aside/addition if you change the grep bit to:

Code: Select all

grep -v -E '.*\[.*\]=|^$' "filename"

you get rid of blank lines too.
Note capital E and vertical bar separator between regex bits.

[bin]

Thanks for that chris - a useful extra tweak.

Well, I ran the cleanup and certainly things do feel a bit snappier - especially Konqueror. It may be a placebo effect of course!! But, it still results in a much cleaner system and that I like.

I did try to find a way to make the script recursive, but couldn't get ant sort of -r switch to work. So, I did it old school by finding the folders with .desktop files, created a script tp run on each folder *.desktop and that worked OK. I excluded my /home so that's next