Shell Programming and Scripting

Try "print -r" rather than "echo" to preserve "\c". And put $line in quotes.

Code:

cat abc.txt | while read -r line
do
        print -r "${line}"
done

[S_M_F_ING_MTG_COM_CUSTOMER_EXTRACT]
$InputFile_Borrower=CMTSLST\EDW_COMMERCIAL_MTGE_BORROWER_dat.lst
$InputFile_Customer=CMTSLST\EDW_COMMERCIAL_MTGE_CUSTOMER_dat.lst
$OuputFile_BorrowerNoGridID=CMTS\cm_borrower_exception_no_grid_id.out
$OutputFile_BorrowerDup=CMTS\cm_borrower_exception_dup.out

Thank you Methyl......your solution works great!!!!

Is there a way to store the value in a variable? I tried the following but it's not working as expected:

cat abc.txt | while read -r line
do
var1=`print -r "${line}"`
echo "$var1"
done

The reason that I want to store the value in a variable is because I have some logic in my script and want to make reference use of a variable var1 in a number of places.

This required solution is work-related and script is doing some logic verification based on input file and it's not a matter of just copying (cp) the input file.

I've only shown a simplified sample script in order to get a solution.

Remember that "echo" reacts to "\c" so we need to avoid echo.
If you need the variable in $var1 we don't need $line .

Code:

cat abc.txt | while read -r var1
do
       print -r "${var1}"
done

And to top it off, the pipe can be left out as well and IFS= preserves leading spacing.

Code:

while IFS= read -r var1
do
   print -r "$var1"
done < abc.txt

One observation. Is it safe to assume that the file names in your variables are for a Windows or Netware server? Filenames containing a backslash character "\" will give you grief in a unix filesystem and as you have found require special treatment in shell variables. The unix delimiter between a directory name and a file name is of course a solidus character "/".

I'm processing an input file containing this data:

[S_M_F_ING_MTG_COM_CUSTOMER_EXTRACT]
$InputFile_Borrower=CMTSLST\EDW_COMMERCIAL_MTGE_BORROWER_dat.lst
$InputFile_Customer=CMTSLST\EDW_COMMERCIAL_MTGE_CUSTOMER_dat.lst
$OuputFile_BorrowerNoGridID=CMTS\cm_borrower_exception_no_grid_id.out
$OutputFile_BorrowerDup=CMTS\cm_borrower_exception_dup.out

The text in bold-faced-red is making reference to a subdirectory on our Unix server.

From what I understand, the input data cannot be stored in a variable called var1? I wanted to store the input data in a variable so that I can compare it to some constant value (while also preserving the input raw data).

For ex: Logic in my script is as follows:

if $var1 = "ABC" then
output_line = "First level"
else
if $var1 = "CDE" then
output_line = "Second level"
else
output_line = "Third level"
fi
fi

As you can see, it's not just reading the input and printing it out - I need to process the input data and comparing it.

Thanks.

That is not the correct format for a unix directory.