I find myself doing this sort of thing a fair bit and setting up a local param_val() function makes the code much more maintainable/extendable/readable,
and as long as your only processing a few files the overhead can pretty much be ignored, more often than not the file will still be in the cache anyway.


Remember your going to be comming along in a year or two and going "What the $%#$ is this damn awk script doing!"

Code:

#!/bin/bash
 
function param_val {
    sed -n "s/^${1}=//p" $2 2> /dev/null
}
 
 
for i in `ls -c1 /usr/share/applications`
do
    CF=/usr/share/applications/$i
    name=$(param_val Name $CF)
    executable=$(param_val Exec $CF)
    icon=$(parm_val Icon $CF)
    categories=$(param_val Categories $CF | cut -d\; -f1)
done