Shell Programming and Scripting

Here attachment files are being read from REPORTS.LOG which has got file names as :

/home/jboss/temp/a.html
/home/jboss/temp/temp/b.html

Here files are separated by new line character "\n".

Hence we can change IFS to "\n" instead of default " " before files names are appended around -a inside the for loop

Code:

IFS_backup=$IFS
IFS=$'\n'
for (( i=0; i<$TOTAL_REPORTS; i++ ))
do
        a[i]=`sed -n "$((i+1))""p" "REPORTS.LOG"`
        attachments=( "${attachments[@]}" "`echo "-a ${a[i]} "`")
done
IFS=$IFS_backup

---------- Post updated 02-06-13 at 12:21 PM ---------- Previous update was 02-05-13 at 06:08 PM ----------

Issue found.
We know default IFS for bash shell is " " [[SPACE].
Hence while above script tries to read the attachments, for some reason string is broken.
So we can update script to set temperory IFS to "\n" while the attachment files are being read in a for loop and then set original IFS state.

Code:

TEMP_IFS=$IFS
IFS=$'\n'
for (( i=0; i<$TOTAL_REPORTS; i++ ))
do
        a[i]=`sed -n "$((i+1))""p" "REPORTS.LOG"`
        attachments=( "${attachments[@]}" "`echo "-a ${a[i]} "`")
done
IFS=$TEMP_IFS

This is tested and works as expected.

If you set IFS just in a subshell, when then subshell is gone, so is the funny IFS.