Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi ppl.

I want to read the first word of each line of a text file to a variable in a bash script.

Can anyone help pls, thanks.

For reading 1st word:

Code:

temp11=$(awk '{print $1}' file_name.txt)
echo $temp11

OR

Code:

temp2=$(cut -d " " -f1 file_name.txt)
echo $temp2

For reading 1st character:

Code:

temp=$(cut -c 1 file_name.txt)
cat $temp

I hope this helps.

another example:

Code:

while read var x
do
  echo $var
done < infile

Both work fine, many thanks! And seems so simple. Have to look at the awk command to understand it.

I was trying to cycle something like this:

Code:

cat ../data/SP500symbols.txt | sed -n '1p'

But because I'm a newbie to bash didn't manage to make the line cycle work...


Now I only need to read each word at a time from the $temp11 variable. I want to use each word to construct an HTTP address and use curl to download a file for each one.

Can anyone help me on using cycles with variables. I don't really understand the use of variables. Are there different variable types? I'm used to C and matlab scripting only...

thanks again

Deploy rdrtx1's proposal. It will cycle through the file, reading each line's first word into var, until file is done. Put your commands into the loop.
Your sed construct will print the entire first line, that's it. To gather the first word (into another file), use sth like

Code:

 sed  's/^\([^ \t]*\).*/\1/' file

It will collect any non-space char (i.e. the first word) at the start of line, and then the rest of the line, replace the line with those non-spaces, and print.

Thanks RudiC but I'm already using this:

Code:

address=$(echo "http://www.google.com/finance/getprices?i=60&p=1d&f=d,o,h,l,c,v&df=cpct&q=")

#read the name of each SP500 company
symbolsList=$(awk '{print $1}' ../data/SP500symbols.txt)

for symbol in $symbolsList
do 
  echo $symbol;
  fullAdd=$(echo $address$symbol)
  
#curl -o saveDir httpAddr

done

It's simple and works fine.

Not only need to think a little on how to use curl and make the script run every day to save the data files.

Nice Sunday!

If you're happy with what you posted, fine. Hint: you dont need the echo and command substitution for simple variable assignments (address & fullAdd).