Shell Programming and Scripting

Wow it works like a champ, how cool is that? Thanks to the both of you for you help.

So I Googled around a little, and everyone shows how to do use it but not really any discription on what exactly it is. Let me see if I understand correctly.
IFS = Input Field Seperator; does that work for any kind of input like getline or a filename.sh < filename.lst etc.? Thanks again!

yes, it does work on every form of input where "fields" are regarded. It will, for instance, affect the way the statement "read word1 word2 remainder" works, because a "word" is basically something surrounded by two IFS chars, whatever that may be (or BOF/EOF, of course).

Another solution to your problem is to read in your file in a loop:

Code:

(( cnt = 0 ))
cat <file> | while read line ; do
     typeset myarr[$cnt]="$line"
     (( cnt += 1 ))
done

But notice, that it is necessary to protect (by quoting) your resulting variables. Once you set $IFS back to its original value you can't rely on the array elements not being split up into words if you do not surround them with double quotes.

bakunin

Right on, thanks bakunin. I am taking an alternate approach with this script. I havn't worked with functions much and arrays at all, so I am making a script entirely based on this to attempt to broaden by abilities. The script looks really tidy, and probably runs faster setup this way; rather then reading an endless amount of awk statements, for loops etc. Thanks to all for the help.