topic Shell script's command line parameter delimiter in Operating System - HP-UX

Shell script's command line parameter delimiter

Victor Balenton — Mon, 02 Feb 2004 19:55:00 GMT

Just wanted to get some ideas on how to pick up the delimiters from a command line in Korn shell script.
I will have delimiter ":" instead of space (which is default) in the command line for e.g:
# testmail ::::
/usr/sbin/sendmail -t << EOM
From:$1
To:$2
Subject:$3
$(/usr/bin/uuencode $4 $5)
EOM

In the above script,I want to pick up the delimiter ":" from the command line so as to pick up the positional parameter ($1,$2,$3..) values.

Appreciate if you can give some ideas.

Thanks much,

Re: Shell script's command line parameter delimiter

Ian Kidd_1 — Mon, 02 Feb 2004 20:17:48 GMT

Something like this might work. I didn't get the opportunity to test it since I removed sendmail...

STRING=$1
FROM=`echo $STRING | awk -F: '{print $1}'`
TO=`echo $STRING | awk -F: '{print $2}'`
SUBJECT=`echo $STRING | awk -F: '{print $3}'`
FILE_ATTACH=`echo $STRING | awk -F: '{print $4}'`
NAME_ATTACH=`echo $STRING | awk -F: '{print $5}'`

this would preceed the rest of your script.
and instead of having "From:$1", you would have
From:${FROM}
etc.

It seemed to work when I used `echo $FROM`, etc.

Re: Shell script's command line parameter delimiter

Bill Hassell — Mon, 02 Feb 2004 20:48:22 GMT

Note that the shell will still pay attention to spaces as parameter separators so you'll either have to require " around the string or escape the special meaning of spaces (in the subject line) with \ as in:

testmail "myname@mydomain.com:somebody@another.com:This is a test:/etc/issue"

testmail myname@mydomain.com:somebody@another.com:This\ is \a \test:/etc/issue

Otherwise, there will be $2 $3 etc. Be sure to test for $# to make sure there's only 1 parameter.

Re: Shell script's command line parameter delimiter

Steven E. Protter — Mon, 02 Feb 2004 21:04:16 GMT

I'm not sure this appropriate but I've developed a mail with attachment script. It take parameters 5 through whatever and uses them to put together the sujbect.

It might be what you want. Probably not.

I'm posting it anyway. Zero point me if its useless.

You'll have to use awk as shown above to do it with colons and spaces will still screw that up.

SEP

Re: Shell script's command line parameter delimiter

curt larson_1 — Mon, 02 Feb 2004 21:12:43 GMT

you can try something like this

oldIFS="$IFS"
IFS=":"
set -- $1
IFS="$oldIFS"

Re: Shell script's command line parameter delimiter

Elmar P. Kolkman — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 03:26:22 GMT

What you can do is:
(echo $1 | awk '{printf "From:%s\nTo:%s\nSubject:%s\n",$1,$2,$3}'
lf=$(echo $1 | cut -d: -f4)
af=$(echo $1 | cut -d: -f5)
/usr/bin/uuencode "$lf" "$af"
) | sendmail -t

I would not recommend using awk for splitting the command line for each argument, as awk uses a lot of resources. The cut command is a lot smaller and does the trick quite right.

Mind the quotes for the uuencode arguments, because you could have spaces in the local or attachment filenames, due to the colon argument seperation.

Re: Shell script's command line parameter delimiter

Elmar P. Kolkman — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 03:29:40 GMT

You could of course also use awk to split the arguments completely:
eval $(echo $1 | awk -F: '{printf "FROM='%s'\nTO='%s'\nSUBJECT='%s'\nLOCALFILE='%s'\nATTACHMENT='%s'\n",$1,$2,$3,$4,$5}')

Then the rest is simple and straight forward, since you have 5 environment variables containing the seperate parts.

Re: Shell script's command line parameter delimiter

Victor Balenton — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 12:42:06 GMT

Thanks to all the ideas, appreciate it much, I picked up one of them which would help us better in our environment. I was planning to send this script's command parameters from an SAP application.

Best Regards,
Victor