Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi gurus,
I need to manipulate the output of a database query. The output contains 2 fields (asset and serial number) and I'd like to combine them into a single value, seperated by whitespace.

the orginal data is in seprate fileds and of the following format:

Code:

asset serial
asset serial
etc    etc

so I'd like to combine the asset value with the serial value.

my solution so far almost gets it done, but I can't seperate the values with whitespace, as it's interpreted as a new line when I feed the values into a loop.

Code:

for i in `database query|awk '{print substr($1,1,20),substr($2,8,10)}'|xargs -n 2 | awk '{ print $1","$2 }'`;do echo $i;done

gives me

Code:

asset, serial
asset, serial
etc, etc

but if I replace the "," with whitespace, the output is:

Code:

asset
serial
asset
serial
etc
etc

instead of

Code:

asset serial                 (Variable 1)
asset serial                 (Variable 2)

I'm looking for the simplest way to achieve the end result, so if there's some perl or sed magic that can do a better job than awk, I'm happy to hear about it.

Thanks very much.

Code:

 
awk '{ print $1","$2 }'
to
awk '{ printf("%s %s",$1,$2 }'

---------- Post updated at 02:00 PM ---------- Previous update was at 01:59 PM ----------

what is the output of database query

From that what you extracting ?

post some output lines of the database query command

Instead of giving "," as delimiter awk '{ print $1","$2 }' in ur code .. give space as delimiter there itself awk '{ print $1" "$2 }' . This might help u ..

Thanks for the replies.

itkamaraj, your solution combined all fields into a single record. What I want is to combine field 1 and field 2 into a single variable, so that the result is "asset serial", etc, etc,

The data is originally formatted in 2 columns, asset followed by serial and there are several hundred records.

jayan_jay, I tried your suggestion initially but the output is seperated by a new line if I run the output through a for/next loop. I want to loop over the data so that I have "asset serial" as a single variable which I can supply to another script.

Thanks for help received so far.

Try:

Code:

database_query | while read record; do
  echo "$record"
done

Try this

Code:

awk '{ printf("%s %s\n",$1,$2 }'

Slight modification in itkamaraj's code.

--ahamed

Thank you to everybody.

The solution was to set IFS to newline so that the loop did not interpret whitespace as a field seperater.