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Full Discussion: SED help - cleaning up code, extra spaces won't go away
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting SED help - cleaning up code, extra spaces won't go away Post 302416023 by alister on Saturday 24th of April 2010 11:28:30 AM
Old 04-24-2010
Quote:
Originally Posted by durden_tyler
But if I assign the quoted output of that pipeline to a shell variable, then spaces are introduced.
The value of $VAR does contain the newlines. It may seem that the shell is converting newlines to spaces, but it is not. Since the variable expansion is unquoted, it's splitting the result into words at each of those newlines (and spaces and tabs, assuming a default value for IFS). echo never sees the newlines. echo does its job, printing its arguments as space-delimited list. If VAR is double-quoted, echo will be invoked with one argument which will contain newlines.

Code:
$ VAR=`awk -F, '{print $2}' input.txt | sed 's/-i/\|/g'`
$ echo $VAR
| b | e | h
$ echo "$VAR"
 | b
 | e
 | h


Sidenote: Just as echo isn't seeing any of the newlines (because the shell "consumed" them during the field splitting step), echo is not seeing any of the spaces either. You are just less likely to miss them since echo prints a space to delimit its arguments, which are often space delimited to begin with. (Although you would notice that multiple-consecutive spaces are squeezed into one.)

Code:
$ VAR='a b c'
$ # Gives the impression that field splitting did not happen, but it did.
$ echo $VAR
a b c
$ VAR='a          b              c'
$ echo $VAR
a b c
$ echo "$VAR"
a          b              c

Regards,
Alister
Last edited by alister; 04-24-2010 at 12:40 PM..
 

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LEARN ABOUT REDHAT

mkoctfile

MKOCTFILE(1)						      General Commands Manual						      MKOCTFILE(1)

NAME

       mkoctfile - Compile dynamic-load modules for GNU Octave

SYNOPSIS

       mkoctfile [-IDIR] [-DDEF] [-lLIB] [-LDIR] [-M|--depend]	  [-c] [-o   FILE|--output  FILE] [-p  VAR|--print  VAR] [-s|--strip]	[-v|--ver-
       bose] [-h|-?|--help] file ...

DESCRIPTION

       mkoctfile is used to compile source C, C++ or Fortran source code in dynamically loadble file for octave(1).

OPTIONS

       mkoctfile accepts the following options:

       -IDIR   Add include directory DIR to compile commands.

       -DDEF   Add definition DEF to compiler call.

       -lLIB   Add library LIB to link command.

       -LDIR   Add library directory DIR to link command.

       -M|--depend
	       Generate dependency files (.d) for C and C++ source files.

       -c      Compile but do not link.

       -o FILE|--output FILE
	       Output file name; default extension is .oct.

       -p VAR|--print VAR
	       Print configuration variable VAR.  Recognized variables are:
		   CPPFLAGS    CPICFLAG
		   INCFLAGS    CXX
		   F2C	       CXXFLAGS
		   F2CFLAGS    CXXPICFLAG
		   F77	       XTRA_CFLAGS
		   FFLAGS      XTRA_CXXFLAGS
		   FPICFLAG    SHLEXT
		   CC	       SH_LD
		   CFLAGS      SH_LDFLAGS

       -s|--strip
	       Strip the output file.

       -v|--verbose
	       Echo commands as they are executed.

       file    Compile or linke file. Recognised file types are
		   .c	 C source
		   .cc	 C++ source
		   .C	 C++ source
		   .cpp  C++ source
		   .f	 Fortran source
		   .F	 Fortran source
		   .o	 object file
		   .SH SEE ALSO
		   .BR octave (1).

AUTHOR

       John W. Eaton <jwe@bevo.che.wisc.edu>

       This manual page was contributed by Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org> for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution but may be used by others.

GNU Octave							  1 November 2002						      MKOCTFILE(1)
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