Rob, I'm not sure about other surprises, but why are you doing this in a shell script, and not Perl? (If you're like me and don't know Perl, I can understand a little, but I'm _trying_ to learn.)
Mark Post -----Original Message----- From: Rob van der Heij [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, June 14, 2002 1:20 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Puzzled by Bash interpolation I have input files that contain lines with variables like HOSTNAME=$THISHOST DOMAIN=$THISDOM and another one that has the definitions like THISHOST=linux007 THISDOM=rvdheij.com and I want to produce the files that are like HOSTNAME=linux007 DOMAINT=rvdheij.com So I thought I could simply source the definitions and then run a little loop like . ./mydefs while read line ; do eval echo "$line" ; done This works, except for comment lines in my original input that suddenly turn out to be blank lines? Now I suppose I can treat those differently, but what else am I going to find as a surprise? Rob
