Shell Programming and Scripting

Hey all,

I'm very new to shell scripting and would love some help. I have been messing around with KSH at my job, and have been tasked with generating an XML file from multiple CSV files. However, I barely even understand the syntax for for loops! Output should be something along the lines of

Code:

<section name="Query1">
<entry name="DocumentType">first field from first CSV file</entry>
<entry name=Name1">second field from first CSV file</entry>
<entry name="Value1">first field from second CSV file</entry>
...
<entry name=NameN">N+1th field from first CSV file</entry>
<entry name="ValueN">Nth field from second CSV file</entry>
</section>

This will go on until a newline, at which point the process will repeat. Can anyone point me in the direction of a guide that will explain the process? Really, it's the whole escaping characters thing that's killing me, because it makes any code I look at seem foreign. The guy I'm working on this under hasn't provided the second .CSV file yet, so I'm not even 100% sure of the syntax. Also, the first .CSV file contains a lot of empty fields, I want to make sure I just skip over those properly. I realize that this is a very n00bish request, since I don't even have pseudocode yet, just trying to get a handle on how to handle delimiters and what not. Thanks in advance for any help.

I would suggest using paste and read each field using a while loop:

Code:

paste file1.csv file2.csv | while read f1 f2 f3 f4
do
   ...
done

Interesting. I never even knew that command existed. Seems like it should be able to do what I want; thanks, gonna play around a bit.