How to execute XPath one-liners from shell?

You can also try my Xidel. It is not in a package in the repository, but you can just download it from the webpage (it has no dependencies).

It has simple syntax for this task:

xidel filename.xml -e '//element/@attribute' 

And it is one of the rare of these tools that supports XPath 2.

One package that is very likely to be installed on a system already is python-lxml. If so, this is possible without installing any extra package:

python -c "from lxml.etree import parse; from sys import stdin; print('\n'.join(parse(stdin).xpath('//element/@attribute')))"

You should try these tools :

• xmlstarlet (xmlstarlet page) : can edit, select, transform... Not installed by default, xpath1
• xmllint (man xmllint): often installed by default with libxml2-utils, xpath1 (check my wrapper to have --xpath switch on very old releases and newlines delimited output (v < 2.9.9)). Can be used as interactive shell with the --shell switch.
• xpath : installed via perl's module XML::Xpath, xpath1
• xml_grep : installed via perl's module XML::Twig, xpath1 (limited xpath usage)
• xidel (xidel): xpath3
• saxon-lint (saxon-lint): my own project, wrapper over @Michael Kay's Saxon-HE Java library, xpath3: using SaxonHE 9.6 ,XPath 3.x (+retro compatibility)

Examples:

xmllint --xpath '//element/@attribute' file.xml
xmlstarlet sel -t -v "//element/@attribute" file.xml
xpath -q -e '//element/@attribute' file.xml
xidel -se '//element/@attribute' file.xml
saxon-lint --xpath '//element/@attribute' file.xml