Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello,

I am new to shell scripting, and I am trying to create a script that reads an input like the following

firstname:lastname:age
firstname:lastname:age
firstname:lastname:age

in a text file. I have a 2 part question. First how do I open the file in a shell script. And then how can I read the "firstname" and put it into a variable, then read the "lastname" into a different variable, and so on until I reach the end of the file. I dont want the ':' in the variables at all.

Thanks

#!/bin/ksh

file='path2inputFile'

while IFS=: read firstname lastname age junk
do
echo "firstname->[${firstname}] lastname->[${lastname}] age->[${age}]
done < "${file}"

Code:

#!/usr/bin/ksh

while read line
do
  fName=`echo $line | awk -F":" '{ print $1 }'`
  lName=`echo $line | awk -F":" '{ print $2 }'`
  age=`echo $line | awk -F":" '{ print $3 }'`

done < file1

This method works great, although I am writing the output to a file, and it puts the new line ^M character in it. How can I remove it?

the 'echo' is simply for the demonstration purpose on how to access the 'read' variable.

You can use awk to do this simply as,

Code:

awk -F ":" '{ print "Firstname="$1" Lastname="$2" Age="$3 }' <filename>

IF you are getting ^M characters then your input file is using DOS encoding. To remove that use as,

Code:

dos2ux <filename>

HTH.

It would be dos2unix rather than dos2ux.

Correct me if Iam wrong.

Vino