This was a very educational thread. Thanks for posing the question and the summary, and thanks everyone for the useful answers. I don't have a need for this just yet, but I have saved the thread as I am sure the answers will be useful sooner or later.
I eagerly await the next educational thread. Who's going to ask the question? Michael On Tue, 14 Nov 2006, Maxim Vexler wrote:
On 11/14/06, Oded Arbel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [snip](IFS="$(echo)"; \ for pair in `awk '/^[^[].+[^\n]$/ {print $1,$3}' passwd.fake`; do echo "$pair"; done) In the second example, I force the record separator to be only the new line character (the output from 'echo'. I can probably use \n, but I wanted to play it safe). Do mind the wrapping of the second form in parenthesis, otherwise you clobber your global IFS, which is something you want to avoid. -- Oded : : .. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. -- Winston ChurchillThanks to everyone for the help, all solution worked. To sum up the tips: By Oded Arbel: a. Use a subshell to avoid mistakenly over riding your shell variables. b. Use "$(echo)" as portable(?) newline variable scripting style. By Ehud Karni: a. Pipeing into bash subshell can be accepted inside the shell with read. b. using a "while read VAR1 VAR2 VAR3..." is a convenient method to accepting stdin data. c. awk has system() !! By Amos Shapira: a. General work around is to construct the whole command as text, then use either piping to sh or bash buildin "expr". By Omer Shapira: a. xargs -n switch can be used to "collect" variables separated by either of [\n\t ]. By Valery Reznic: a. set -- "space delimited word list" can be used as a quick method for assigning value to number variables ($1..$9). [question: Really? this does not seem to work for me]. b. bash while loop can get stdin from file IO redirection. Ariel Biener doesn't understand the need for voodoo in modern life... ;) Thanks guys for an educational thread. Maxim. -- Cheers, Maxim Vexler "Free as in Freedom" - Do u GNU ? ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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