Hello-

I am new to the forum(forst post) and I am enthralled with the power of programming. I am writing a shell script to go into an apache config to add a ServerAlias mine to about 400 virtual servers.

I am probably approaching this in the most difficult of ways since I am not familiar with the commands. BUT...

The first question I have is how to use a file with a list in a for loop. So I have a file, named file.txt and it has 500 lines in it. I want the for loop to assign each line to the variable to process.

I tried something like this:

for i in 'cat file.txt'
do

this does not work since it wants to do something to "cat file.txt" How can I get it to process the list which is in the file.txt


-Bob

You may be having single quotes..Use backticks instead and it should work

for i in `cat file.txt`
do
echo $i
done

or

for i in $(cat file.txt)
do
echo $i
done

Wow, you guys are fast!!

The problem I am running into is that the lines have two space delimited words on them. I would like to get the whole line into the the $i. How would I do that?

-Bob

That, my friends works very well. I hope you do mot mind me following up a more difficult question. This is where you may realize that my algorithm may not be up to the preschooler level.

If I knew regular expressions better, I would have probably attacked this directly with that. I am working within my framework of limited knowledge of the commands. I know that there are all kinds of resources on the web to learn this, but that is the problem.

Anyway, dont laugh....too hard. I am using

#!/bin/sh

#make a list of the lines I need to use- edit and append on next line
sed '/ServerName/!d; /domain.com/!d' httpd.conf > temp.txt

#thankyou kindly for the help
while read i
do

#I am trying to change add a ServerAlias to each of the sub-domains. Dont ask, #these customers are nuts. This is my attempt and does not work.
convert=$(sed 's/ServerName /ServerAlias www./g')

# would then try to use sed to append the line right under the original($i) I got.
sed '/$i/ a\
$convert'
done < temp.txt

Maybe you could let me know of a better way to go about doing this. I am realizing this approach is flawed.

-Bob

could you post an input file AND the desired output, pls - it might be easier to understand the objective.

change the confidential data to something meaningless if there's a concern.