Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,
I am reading a file line by line using read line function of while loop. Each line contains 4 fields. I want to take these 4 values in 4 variables in each iteration so that i can use them in my script. The issue here is that my awk command is returning awkward results -
Here is a sample line -
ABCD|*[!Z!gz]|1|7
The command i am using - dir=$(echo $line | awk '{ print $1}') -- this is fine
But when i run the command - dir=$(echo $line | awk '{ print $3}') -- it doesn't give me the value 1...May be due to special characters in the data (*[!Z!gz]).
Can anyone please suggest how to handle it.
Regards,
Manoj

One way (without awk):

Code:

$ cat Test
while IFS="|" read A B C D; do
  echo "$A"
  echo "$B"
  echo "$C"
  echo "$D"
done < file1

Code:

$ cat file1
ABCD|*[!Z!gz]|1|7

Code:

$ ./Test
ABCD
*[!Z!gz]
1
7

Or else tell awk that "|" is the separator with:

Code:

awk -F"|" '{ print $3 }'

I'm not very sure that goes half way to answering the question, but OK

Thank you! Scottn. The 1st one works. Actually, i was using awk with the seperator but its not giving the correct output.

There's nothing wrong with an awk solution... I've written a million of them... and some of them work!

But when you're talking about "iterating" and "putting the values into variables", sometimes the best solution is the simplest one.

I was anwering the how to extract the 3rd element:

Code:

$ cat garman.txt
ABCD|*[!Z!gz]|1|7
$ awk -F"|" '{ print $3 }' garman.txt
1
$