What OS are you using? /bin/sh varies considerably from system to system. (It is a 1980's vintage Bourne shell on some systems, a hard link or a symlink to a Korn shell on some systems, a hard link or symliink to bash on some systems, and there are lots of other possibilities on other systems.)

And, 4val is not a valid variable name (at least in Bourne, bash, and Korn shells where user defined shell variables start with an underscore or an alphabetic character; not a number).

I don't understand why you're using echo and awk to get the 2nd and 4th fields from constant strings. If the strings are constants, why not just use:

Code:

VAL2=3
VAL4=3

So, if you aren't processing constant strings, where are they coming from? Are they already stored in a shell variable? Are they from the 1st line of a file?

Arrays can't be used on all UNIX systems with /bin/sh, but we can probably come up with something portable and efficient if you give us a better description of where the data comes from and what you want to do with it.