Extract an attribute value from XML Using Bash, File: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <blah> <blah1 path="er" name="andy" remote="origin" branch="master" tag="true" /> <blah1 path="er/er1" name="Roger" remote="origin" branch="childbranch" tag="true" /> <blah1 path="er/er2" name="Steven" remote="origin" branch="master" tag="true" /> </blah> I have tried the following: grep -i 'name="andy" remote="origin" branch=".*\"' <filename> But it returns the whole line: <blah1 path="er" name="andy" remote="origin" branch="master" tag="true" /> I would like to match the line based on the following: name="andy" I just want it to return: master

Use an XML parser for parsing XML data. With xmlstarlet it just becomes an XPath exercise:


$ branch=$(xmlstarlet sel -t -v '//blah1[@name="andy"]/@branch' file.xml)
$ echo $branch
master