topic Re: Simple scripting question in Operating System - HP-UX

Simple scripting question

Tim Medford — Wed, 15 Jan 2003 20:03:02 GMT

I'm sure this is simple, but I've been hung up for a couple hours on it.

I have a "for" loop which cats a file. The file contains 2 columns of data separated by a space. I want each line to come into the loop as 1 argument instead of two. No matter how I've tried to quote things it keeps treating each word in the document as 1 pass through the loop.

for i in `cat /tmp/rfile`
do
echo $i
done

assuming /tmp/rfile contains:
abc 123
def 456
etc...

The output looks like
abc
123
def
456

I want it to look like
abc 123
def 456

I want the value of $i to be "abc 123" first time, and "def 456" second time.

Thanks in advance!
Tim

Re: Simple scripting question

Patrick Wallek — Wed, 15 Jan 2003 19:44:21 GMT

How about this:

while read i
do
echo $i
done < test

Re: Simple scripting question

harry d brown jr — Wed, 15 Jan 2003 19:44:33 GMT

Add this to your cat:

cat /tmp/rfile|sed "s/ //g"

or if they are possibly tabs and/or spaces:

cat /tmp/rfile|sed "s/[[:space:]]//g"

live free or die
harry

Re: Simple scripting question

A. Clay Stephenson — Wed, 15 Jan 2003 19:45:36 GMT

Let's change the loop a bit:

#!/usr/bin/sh

cat /tmp/rfile | while read i
do
echo "${i}"
done

Re: Simple scripting question

Ian Kidd_1 — Wed, 15 Jan 2003 19:51:42 GMT

I tested this and it seems to work fine:

exec 3< /tmp/rfile
i=`line <& 3`
while test "$?" -eq 0
do
echo $i
i=`line <& 3`
done

those are back-tiks rather than single quotes.

Re: Simple scripting question

Patrick Wallek — Wed, 15 Jan 2003 20:09:41 GMT

In my above post the 'test' is the filename you are redirecting back into the little script.

My file looked like this:

# cat test
abc 123
def 456
ghi 789

Re: Simple scripting question

James R. Ferguson — Wed, 15 Jan 2003 20:09:43 GMT

Hi Tim:

This will yield what you seek:

while read F1 F2
do
echo $F1 $F2
done < /tmp/rfile

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: Simple scripting question

Hai Nguyen_1 — Wed, 15 Jan 2003 20:10:01 GMT

Tim,

Try this small program:

while read LINE
do
echo $LINE
done
Hai

Re: Simple scripting question

Rodney Hills — Wed, 15 Jan 2003 20:14:52 GMT

To expand on the above script,

IFS=""
while read LINE
do
echo $LINE
done
Setting IFS to null will prevent "read" from breaking up the input line into "words".

HTH

-- Rod Hills