Shell Programming and Scripting

I've used the grep command along with sed to sent ouput to a file, like shown below
DATE=grep file1 /home/zoolz/delreg | sed -e 's/^.*:://' #not exact code but near enough
This works fine as it takes all the lines with the word file1 in it ands cuts it down so that i am just left with the date. In case your wondering '/home/zoolz/delreg' the file that i am taking the info from contains lines like this.
file1@@/bin/user/file1::31/10/05

Now i have a couple of dates in the DATE variable and i want to seperate them into seperate variables say date1 date2 etc. Can i use read in the script or do i sent them to a function that i create. I've tried both these ways and when i pass DATE to a function it does divide it up but not in a way that will deal with a case of a large number.

Eg.
sortdate()
date1=$1
date2=$2
date3=$3
etc

Also when i use an until loop for this with a counter it just does not work. Does anyone have any idea where i'm going wrong.

Hi

Here is a funny way of doing it.

First, find how many dates there are in DATE variable:
nr_dates=$(echo "(`echo $DATE | sed -e 's/[0-9]//g' -e 's/ //g' | wc -c` -1) / 2" | bc)

Then, put every field of the DATE variable into "dat" array.
i=1
while [ $i -le $nr_dates ] ; do
dat[$i]=`echo $DATE | cut -f$i -d' '`
let i=i+1
done

Try now:
echo ${dat[1]}
echo ${dat[2]}
or
i=1
while [ $i -le $nr_dates] ; do
echo ${dat[$i]}
let i=i+1
done

Regards,
Luis