Shell Programming and Scripting

Man it has been too long since I have had to do this type of stuff...

OK I have a file with lines in it looking like this:
bob:johnson:email@email.com (most lines)

john:F.:doe:email2@email.com (but some are like this)

I need to loop through and assign vars to the values:

var Fname = bob
var Lname = johnson
var email = email@email.com

If there is a middle initial I want to toss it and move on and get the last name from the next (3rd) field.


I have tried this:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

while read line
do
        Fname=`cut -d: -f1`
        Field2=`cut -d: -f2`
                if [ "$Field2" = "##" ]; then
                        Lname=`cut -d: -f3`
                else
                        Lname=$Field2
                fi

        echo -e  "First Name is :$Fname\n"
        echo -e  "Last Name is :$Lname\n"
done < test

BTW this code is tabbed to be easier to read but this board is taking them out of it for some reason...

Needless to say it isn't working or I would not be posting this....

I get this as an output for example:

First Name is :Linda
Wendy
Esther
Pamela
Richard
William
Leona
Anne
Elaine

Last Name is :



Any help is appreciated.

What I am doing is searching for any 2 characters (the .. does this in sed) with the third character a . (need to do \. in sed so it knows I want the period), and deletes those three if they exist.

Code:

> echo "john:F.:doe:email2@email.com"
john:F.:doe:email2@email.com
> echo "john:F.:doe:email2@email.com" | sed "s/..\.//g"
john:doe:email2@emacom

Now, your data is clean without the initial.

Note... as I think about this, the following might be better as it seaches for : then any character than period:

Code:

> echo "john:F.:doe:email2@email.com" | sed "s/:.\.//g"
john:doe:email2@email.com

First again, thank you very much.

So now I will have:

bob:johnson:email1
jan:geters:email2
ricky:sticky:email3

I need to loop through and assign vars to each value in the line so I can do some testing on them.

Man this is getting complicated, I hate asking for all this help to do things I used to be so good at a long time ago, but I do really appreciate the refresher, so thanks a tun!

Big Picture:

I am going to have one file like the above format. Then another simular file with different colon delimited values. I need to pull lets say last name from file 1 and find it in file 2. Then build a file 3 with the values from the first two files but in a different order..

You follow me?

Just thought it may help if you knew the grand scope of what is going on here...

Can you post samples of the two originating files?
And, what the data should look like in the final (third) file?

Comment and describe where appropriate.

Will do, and thanks again for being willing to help me here.

I think I am on to something so please give me just a minute.

A slight modification in the sender's own code :

while read line
do
echo $line
Fname=`echo $line|cut -d: -f1`
Field2=`echo $line|cut -d: -f2`
len=`echo $Field2|awk '{print length($0)}'`
if [ $len -eq 2 ]; then
Lname=`echo $line|cut -d: -f3`
else
Lname=$Field2
fi
echo "First Name is =$Fname\n"
echo "Last Name is =$Lname\n"
done < 9.txt

Code:

/bin/awk -F: '!/^#/ {print $1, $2, $3}' somefile | \
while read Fname Lname email; do
 echo "Fname:$Fname - Lname:$Lname - Email:$email"
done