Shell Programming and Scripting

I did paste that in a dummy script and renamed it accordingly but it didnt output anything.

The script did run to the user input stage and then concluded. I am trying to understand your code as well I get everything except that I cant seem to find where the grep search would go into the file 'playlist' to hunt down the user input.


Let me know if you'd like me to clarify anything, sometimes I can be vague. thank you for your time


I can try explaining again. So user inputs a name(can be full or partial). The script has to check whether the name exists in the database file(playerlist). Once the script finds a match, it should output the first name and last name columns (12-26, 44-58), however it should check every single line for duplicate first names. So if Michael appears twice, there should be two lines with both Michaels as outputs. I figured a while loop would be appropriate. I will try to play with the code you gave in the meantime though

---------- Post updated at 03:21 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:05 PM ----------

here's what I was thinking for the while loop

Code:

rowCount=$(wc -l <playerlist) #this would store the number of lines in the db

while [ $rowCount - ne 0 ]
do 
  some grep function to search line @ rowCount and output if match found
  rowCount=$(($rowCount-1))
done

# Im thinking that should output all matches found within the database file

You could make the list of patterns into a sed script to go through once and print out what matches any, and even with the first it matches:

Code:

 
sed '
  /pattern1/b
  /pattern2/b
  .
  .
  .
  /patternN/b
  d
 '

or:

Code:

 
sed '
  s/.*pattern1/pattern1: &/
  t
  s/.*pattern2/pattern2: &/
  t
  .
  .
  .
  s/.*patternN/patternN: &/
  t
  d
 '

No need to count the lines:

Code:

while read L
do
   echo "$L"
done <playerlist

Above code reads each line of playerlist and assigns it to the variable L; then prints the variable on screen, until nothing can be read (EOF is reached).
Running the above code should perform the same as typing cat playerlist

Name1=${L:11:14} extracts 14 chars from the 12th char of $L

ahh okay I understand now!

I ran the script and got this

Code:

./test: line 5: conditional binary operator expected
./test: line 5: syntax error near `=~"Name1"'
./test: line 5: `      [[ "$S" =~"Name1" ]] && echo "Name: $Name1 ${L:43:15}"'

=~ is a BASH-ism and won't work in other shells. Even in BASH, I don't think it works the way you have it. What are you trying to do?

that particular part is supposed to check if the user input equals or partially equals $Name1

"partially" equals? What does that mean?