Shell Programming and Scripting

I am new to bash scripting,can anyone suggest a way to connect to ms access
through a bash script

If the Access db is running on the network it should have a DSN which will allow you to access it via ODBC.

You could the use the Perl DBI and DBD::ODBC module to make your queries. eg

Code:

#!/bin/bash
results=`perl -MDBI  -e '
   $dbh = DBI->connect('dbi:ODBC:DSN', 'user', 'password');
   $sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT foo, bar FROM table WHERE baz=?");
      $sth->execute( $baz );    
   while ( @row = $sth->fetchrow_array ) {     
      print "@row\n";   
   }
'`
for result in "$results" ; do
   #process result in some fashion
done

I realise that this looks more like an embedded Perl script than a shell script, however I'm unaware of a command line utility that allows you make DB connections and queries like this.

Not possible using plain shell scripting. You'll need to install unixODBC (if not already available). With that you can access a local MDB file, or one shared through CIFS/Samba, with the help of MDB Tools. If you only have the file available remote, you could either link it to an MSSQL Server, or try creating a ODBC-ODBC bridge (though I've never seen one in a production environment).

tanx guys...
I'll try it out and update the result.......