validate-configs-action VS structured-text-tools

Took me bout 2 days for the initial release of the config-file-validator. I had been thinking about it for a while and was able just to knock it pretty quickly

https://github.com/Boeing/config-file-validator

Project Link: https://github.com/Boeing/config-file-validator

Github Action to use the config-file-validator (https://github.com/Boeing/config-file-validator) to recursively scan the directory structure of a repo for config files and validate their syntax as part of a CI/CD pipeline.

This is useful as a quick quality gate in your CI pipeline to validate that a syntax error was not introduced in the latest commit. Currently XML, JSON, YAML, INI, and TOML are supported with CSV, HCL, and Plist coming in the next release.

Here's how to add it to your existing workflow: https://github.com/kehoecj/validate-configs-action/tree/main...

This works well in scripts and logs of all the commands you need to do to reproduce the current state of the system from a scratch install. Also can be used with diff -u and patch, sed, perl, and awk oneliners and structured text tools. You can also capture most of the commands using sudo logging feature but it won't capture the here documents. But for modest size files you can use newlines in echo commands. Note that commands which use redrection should use something like ~~~~ sudo bash -c "echo 'foo' >>file.txt" ~~~~ instead of "sudo echo foo >>file.txt" or "echo foo | sudo tee -a file.txt

TFA is about how to handle csv files with awk. This might be useful in straightforward cases.

For all others I’d recommend to have a look at

https://github.com/dbohdan/structured-text-tools

which lists tools to handle structure text formats

in general, I'd pick something from https://github.com/dbohdan/structured-text-tools

Also, here is a list of structured text tools. You may find some tools there that are helpful in editing configuration files from the command line. Or you can use "diff -u" to create a patch file (you need to save the patch files along with sudo.log) to recreate. Also, use sfdisk --dump and sfdisk --backup to save partition information in a form that can be used to recreate backups.