Shell Programming and Scripting

Hey guys. Below is the command I am using to assign "yellow" to the variable yellow. I can seem to echo it out using xargs but when I assign it to yellow and then try to echo it out it prints a blank line.

Below is the command. Your help is highly appreciated!


cut -c 2- color.txt | xargs -I {} yellow={};

What variable because all you're doing is echo'ing yellow=yellow and nothing more as you aren't assigning anything to a variable...

No need to waste time using an external utility, the shell can do this all by itself.

Code:

# Read the first line of color.txt
read LINE < color.txt
# Throw away the first character.  Works like ${VAR:START:LENGTH}
LINE="${LINE:1}"

Depending on what your data looks like, there may be even more efficient ways to do this reading several values at once without cut or other externals.

The reason for the behaviour you describe is that xargs and the assignment are being run in a subshell whose environment is not passed back to the parent process.

@Corona688 Thanks for the reply. Is there a way where I can use that command to grab a string literal from a line number further in the page??

Show the input you have, and show the output you want.

Hey Corona688. Sorry about doubling up the last post. I don;t understand what you mean by "Show the input you have, and show the output you want"

I was just trying to retrieve a string from a line number and then use cut to get a specific set of characters from it. I was able to do that successfully using

Code:

sed -n 73p  style.css | cut -c  30-35 |

I am now trying to take the argument replace it in a file and redirect the output back to that same file... Everything is working but I can't seem to find a way to redirect it back to the same file

sed -n 73p style.css | cut -c 30-35 | xargs -I :hex: sed 's/!BGCOLOR!/:hex:/' client_custom.css