That is clever, but I don't know if it works for my situation, which is this:

I have a record that looks like:

Code:

acl add name=ACL_RULE_NAME pos=400 action=allow agent=proxy authneeded=no \
dest=netgroup:destinations_ssh destburb=external nataddr= \
service=ssh source=ipaddr:1.2.3.4 sourceburb=internal \
comments='this is comments' \
lastchangedby='changed by the guy'

I want to break that down and pull out just the stuff I care about, namely name, dest, destburb, source, sourceburb and service.

I had planned on doing something like:

Code:

while read line 
do
source=`grep -o "source=.* "`
dest=`grep -o "dest=.* "`
echo "$source $dest"
done

I'm sure there is a more elegant or effective way... actually now that I'm looking at it that wont work since they records are on different lines... might have to use awk. However, I cant even get the idea in motion without grep -o.