Recently I needed to parse my pom.xml file to get the artifact version out of it. I needed it on one of our CI agents and I did not have maven installed. I wrote a bash command to parse.

Here it is

grep version pom.xml | grep -v -e '<?xml|~'| head -n 1 | sed 's/[[:space:]]//g' | sed -E 's/<.{0,1}version>//g' | awk '{print $1}'

Let’s go over it step by step to help us understand it better

• grep version pom.xml - this till get you all the lines with word version in them
• grep –v –e '<?xml|~' – this will exclude all the matches (-v is reverse match) that are matching the regex (-e), there can be XML specification in the POM file
• head –n 1 - only the first match
• sed 's/[[:space:]]//g' - this removes the spaces around/in version string
• sed -E 's/<.{0,1}version>//g' - this removed the <version> and </version> tags
• awk '{print $1}' - prints the result