Reading INI Files

This article is about how to read ini files in Bash.

Assume we want to read the blogger key from the Links section in the following sample.ini to get the value http://bashmasterclass.blogspot.com.au/:

[Name]
firstname=Stephen
lastname=Quan

[Links]
github=https://github.com/stephenquan/BashMasterClass
blogger=http://bashmasterclass.blogspot.com.au/

The following awk script:

cat sample.ini | tr -d '\r' | awk '
/^\[.*\]$/ { section=$0 }
/=/ { print section $0 }
'

transforms sample.ini file into [SECTION]NAME=VALUE format:

[Name]firstname=Stephen
[Name]lastname=Quan
[Links]github=https://github.com/stephenquan/BashMasterClass
[Links]blogger=http://bashmasterclass.blogspot.com.au/

Now, we can use grep and sed to lookup the blogger key in the Links section:

key=blogger
section=Links

value=$(cat sample.ini | tr -d '\r' | awk '
/^\[.*\]$/ { section=$0 }
/=/ { print section $0 }
' | grep '^\['$section'\]'$key'=' | sed 's/^[^=]*=//')

echo $value # Outputs: http://bashmasterclass.blogspot.com.au/