Shell Programming and Scripting

Does anyone know of a way that I can use the echo command to create a temporary file, but I need to maintain all leading and trailing blanks. I have a script that read tthe contents of a master file and creates temp file with a subset of data from the master, but I need to retain the format. Any advise would be greatly appreciated.

Whatever variable you are using to hold your data.... place it in quotes when you call echo. If you just say

Code:

    echo $var >> tempfile

then echo is just going to see a list of arguments and it's going to separate them by a single blank.

If you say

Code:

    echo "$var" >> tempfile

then echo gets a single string argument and it will be as you expect it.

How do you select the subset of data?
If you are selecting all the lines with some simple pattern, I would use grep:

Code:

grep "special text" master.txt > temp.txt

Let me be more specific, I am using the following:

Code:

while read myline1
do
  	echo "$myline1" >> stub.out
done < ${1}

$1 is a flat file with lines like:

Code:

                          Elapsed time : 63	 $

Leading blanks and the $ shows the end of the line. I wanted to preserve the format when I create the stub.out file. But all leading and trailing blanks are removed and I get:

Code:

Elapsed time : 63$

Thanks for your previous reply.

Code:

while IFS= read myline1
do
  	echo "$myline1" >> stub.out
done < ${1}

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