Shell Programming and Scripting

I am accessing two files. I am using read command to read from the files.

For the first file, I need read the fields delimited by spaces, and for the other file, I need to read the whole line as a single field including the spaces.

When I used read command for the second file, the spaces are removed when read command is used.

I cannot use IFS="" because for the other file, I want the spaces as the delimiters.

Can anyone help??

Thanks,
kumariak

fil1 contains the following

fil2 contains the following

The following code test.sh

Code:

#! /usr/bin/ksh
echo "processing file 1 delimited by spaces"
IFS=" "
while read line
do
echo $line
done < fil1

echo "processing file 2 delimited by EOL"
IFS=\$
while read line
do
echo $line
done < fil2

will output the following

processing file 1 delimited by spaces
A b c d e
e d c b A
processing file 2 delimited by EOL
Abcde
edcbA

Is this what you were looking for?

I suppose the problem is in fact a confusion of what "echo" does with your variables.

"read" is always providing you with the full content of the line, but "echo" (as well as "print", etc.) will interpret your variables, which may change their content.

To prevent this, just enclose your variables in double quotes. Use one of your files and try the following code to see the effect between $line and "$line":

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
typeset line=""
typeset -i counter=0
cat <file> | while read line ; do
     print - "linenr $counter raw   : \"$line\""
     print - "linenr $counter cooked: " \"$line\"
     (( counter += 1 ))
done

bakunin

Thanks bakunin,

But I need to use the second file, for each line of the first file. And, the line from the second file will be used in come other commands like cut and grep. Can you please help How can I proceed on this??

I'm sorry, but I'm at a loss what you want.

Could you please bring a short example of what file1, file2 and the result should look like?

For starters, we had the theme "splitting a file into words" in the thread about "tokenizing", take a look there. This should solve your first file, which you want to read wordwise. The second file could be read by the cat | while ... done loop i sketched out for you already.

Once you have each of the desired values caught in variables you can do whatever you want.

bakunin