One of the reasons questions get answered is the are "interesting" to solve: that means usually: non-trivial, non-obvious, complicated. Its an ironic fact that questions easy to be answered might take a longer time to actually be answered than the complicated and awkward ones.

That is exactly the right approach.


First off, your solution with awk is about the same line as my suggestion of sed - in this regard these two tools do about the same even if they do it in a somewhat different way.

Secondly there is a subtle syntactical error in your code: a variable assignment in shell scripts must not use blanks surrounding the "="-sign. Notice the difference between the two lines:

Code:

x = 100   # wrong
x=100    # correct

The reason is that the shell takes everything up to the "=" to be the variables name, hence when you write "x =" you are assigning a variable named "x " (x followed by a blank) and this is probably not what you intended.

Now for the main problem with your code, which is also of syntactical nature. You do NOT want to assign a string that resembles a command to the variable but you want the output of the command be assigned instead. Therefore you must tell the shell to execute the command separately first and then assign its output. Consider the following lines:

Code:

var=date
var=$(date)

The first line will assign the word "date" to the variable, the second one will first execute the "date"-command (whatever is between $(...) ) and execute it (in a separate shell instance, btw.). Whatever output is produced is then replacing the "$(....)" and only then the commandline is executed assigning the variable.

What does that mean to your problem? Edit the lines in the following way:

Code:

table_name="$(awk '/Table.+[:]/ {print substr($2,10)}' testfile.log)"

PS: some might suggest using backticks (`command`) instead of the $(command) construct. Backticks are an outdated way of basically achieving the same, but should be avoided because the newer construct is much more flexible and also better readable. It is one of the most prominent goals of shell scripting to produce code that is easily maintainable, easily read, easily understood. Backticks look in some fonts so similar to single quotes that because of this alone they should be abandoned. This being not the only disadvantage they have they should be avoided even more.

I hope this helps.

bakunin