Ok, I've mostly solved this myself with a bunch of overhead and definitely not very much finesse. But so far I'm getting the datapoints I need and in a format I can use to extract the final bit I want. I had to continue to use other facilities from the bash script, including awk and some hard-coded echos since I was unable to figure out how to use only xmlstarlet.

Only one issue left...



How do I substitute that "$7" in the print statement with a variable?

EDIT: Solved.



The -v argument allows you to pick up external variables and assign them to variables within awk.


I suppose since I'm here I might also pose another question which could be useful to me.

xmlstarlet has a formatting option which takes in a file, cleans it up and spits it out to stdout like so:



You can obviously redirect that to a file if you'd like. I'm looking for a way to supply it with XML from a variable in bash without having to first save out the contents of the var to a file.

What I need is to have a single file in the end that has been properly formatted. I suppose I can save out a temporary file, format it out to the final file and then delete the temporary one. I was just hoping there was some way I could save that step or at least something less manual.