Shell Programming and Scripting

I tried the eval command - Solaris 2.6 showed the following on the man page: eval - Evaluate a Tcl script. It didn't work and I'm not sure it would unless this was a Tcl script. But it was worth a shot. It also seems to me I have heard of this type of fix before - I just can't remember what/where. Will look at the script in a bit and post back.

'eval' is a built-in command in the borne, korn and c shells. Basically, it evaluates and executes whatever follows it as a command. In my example, '$a' is replaced by it's contents, or "b" so that the 'eval' line becomes the equivalent of 'echo $b'.

I did find in man -s 1 eval - which is what I was thinking about originally - don't know where the link to tcl came from (now I have a situtation to look into!).

Anyway, using the eval DOES work as suggested by gsatch. I put it into the test script I was running and it echos out the variable value.

#!/bin/ksh
for i in `ls`; do
DOH=`echo $i|awk -F. '{print $1$2}'`
echo "$DOH"
eval echo \$$DOH
done


You should not need to 'download' eval - it's a built-in function of the shell (which is why you may not find it with 'which eval').

Post back if you have problems with it - Way to go gsatch!

i knew you guys were a couple of "cool guys" (puts on my steve martin voice from SNL)


thanks much for the help. it does exactly what i want it to do. and i get the spaceing i needed also.

Code:

eval echo \"\$$DFHNAME\"