Problem with cut


 
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# 1  
Old 11-05-2010
Problem with cut

I need to read in a file and output it without the comments or newlines.
The problem is that is not outputting it properly.

Code:
STUDENTSDETAILFILE="../data/studentDetails.txt"

for getlines in `sed '/#/d' $STUDENTSDETAILFILE`
do 
    STUDENTID=`echo $getlines | cut -d: -f1`
    FIRSTNAME=`echo $getlines | cut -d: -f2`
    LASTNAME=`echo "$getlines" | cut -d: -f3`
    printf "%s:%s:%s\n" "${STUDENTID}" "${FIRSTNAME}" "${LASTNAME}" 
done

Code:
#

1:John Peter:KRILL
7:Matthew Robert Laurence:BALSHAW
3:Benjamin Daniel:HARGRAVE

So the output should be
Code:
1:John Peter:KRILL
7:Matthew Robert Laurence:BALSHAW
3:Benjamin Daniel:HARGRAVE

# 2  
Old 11-05-2010
There is no reason to run echo and cut three times per loop. The shell has perfectly good builtin commands to do this without creating six processes per line in the file.

Code:
while read LINE
do
        # Skip comments
        [ "${LINE:0:1}" == "#" ] && continue
        # Skip blank lines
        [ -z "${LINE}" ] && continue

        echo "${LINE}"
done < file

...but you could do all this with one egrep:

Code:
egrep -v '^($|#)' < file


Last edited by Corona688; 11-05-2010 at 02:05 AM.. Reason: used single quotes for egrep
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