Usage

Source the script

You need to source the ini.class.sh file in your script.

cd $( dirname $0 )
. vendor/ini.class.sh || exit 1

With ini.help you get a help with the basic functions.

Get values directly

This is the maybe most used feature: give me a value from an ini file in a given section.

ini.value "<inifile>" "<section>" "<key>"

Get a value from ini file using ini.value with 3 parameters:

  • filename of ini file
  • name of the section to read
  • key / variable in the given section

Example as bash:

server=$( ini.value "/path/to/inifile" "database" "server" )
echo "Server is $server"

Shorter way to get values

Remark: Using the short variant can result in unwanted behaviuor when jumping between different ini files using the shorten syntax for all. It is just bash :-)

If you read multiple values from the same section, you can use set file and maybe section too.

ini.set "<inifile>"

Get a value from ini file using ini.value with 2 parameters:

  • section
  • key

OR

ini.set "<inifile>" <section> to shorten the access with the key only.

Example:


ini.set /path/to/initfile
ini.setsection database

# it can be combined too
# ini.set /path/to/initfile database

# and then you can access of the pre defined file and action
ini.value "server"

# or access another sction
ini.value "othersection" "varname"

Other functions

Get section names

ini.sections "<inifile>"

It returns a list of all section names without brackets.

general
database
...

Get a section

ini.section "<inifile>" <section>

returns the subset from inifile with the given section name. All comments of it are removed.

key1 = "value 1"
key2 = "value 2"
...

Get variable names of a section

ini.keys "<inifile>" <section>

returns the variable names of a section in alphabetic order

key1
key2
...

Dump

With ini.dump "<inifile>" you get a colored output of the ini file and its parsed sections, keys and values.

Use this function if you don’t get an expected value.

Validate

There is an option to validate the syntax of your ini file with a given validation configuration.

ini.validate "<inifile>" "<validate.ini>" [<flag>]

The <flag> is optional. By default it is 0 and shows error information only on STDOUT. Set it to 1 to see more output about the validation process.

See next chapter for more details for the validation syntax.