Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a shell script (Solaris v8 ksh) loading an array from a flat file. An exaple of that flat file is below. It contains white-spaces, and carrage returns. When I try to load the first line as a variable, it (the variable) shows up as the first field not the first line. How do you arrange an array by carrage return? I know it can be done, but can't find anywhere that talk about it. Thanks in advance for replies, this forum rocks!

description.lst snippet ->
API Programmers Reference
Backup Procedures for Vista Plus on UNIX
The Vista Backup and Recovery Plan
Vista Plus Check Generations Usage Guide
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
shell scrip snippet->
set -A description $(cat $SHDIR/description.lst $1)
CNT=0
REPDESC=${description[$CNT]}
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
If I echo $REPDESC I get:
API
I would like it to echo:
API Programmers Reference

I have tried putting the contents of description.lst into “ “ to no avail.

OK just noticed something. If I change the:
set -A reportid $(cat $SHDIR/description.lst $1)
to
set -A reportid $(cat $SHDIR/description.lst $0)
maybe it may work. I will check real quick.

nope didn't change the results. Oh well, anyone??

The problem here is that the array is populated based on space-separated items. The only way I know to get around it is to change the spaces to something else and change them back later when you are ready to print. Not pretty.

djp

Try this:

Code:

IFS='
'
set -A description $(cat $SHDIR/description.lst $1)

If only I'd waited a little longer before displaying my ignorance!

Seriously, thanks for posting the answer, tmarikle. I've been needing that for awhile and it never occurred to me...

djp

No worries.

One thing should be mentioned. IFS typically contains a space, a tab, and a newline character. You may want to save IFS's original value or typeset it in a function when changing it as it may change how your other scripting constructs tokenize lists. This way, IFS can be restored back to its original field separators.

Example:

Code:

OLD_IFS=${IFS}
IFS='
'
set -A ...
IFS=${OLD_IFS}

Thomas