Shell Programming and Scripting

just have a muddled head at the moment... bare with me.

say i have a variable $count... and a list in a file

i want to use the $count line from that textfile but don't seem to recall how to access it?

eg

user=`cat file1.txt` # user to be $count line in that list?


eg

david
mark
james
kevin # want to extract mark as the $count variable

if someone could steer me to the right function I'd greatly appreciate the tip...

Do you want the name mark to be extracted into the $count variable? A simple grep should do the trick.

Code:

count=$(grep "mark" file1.txt)

Remember that if you are using the original bourne shell, you will have to use `...` instead of the $().

sorry no I meant I just have an arbitrary list of names and a while loop set on the $count of the lines in it...

only i can't figure in the loop how to make the line work

Code:

user=`cat file1.txt` # user to be $count line in that list?

user on each loop will be relevant to whichever iteration of the loop $count is already set to...

so... pseudocode

user becomes the $count down the list person for this loop
perform actions on this variable

maybe this will help:

cat file1.txt | while read LINE; do
user=`echo $LINE`
done;

-chiru

hi chiru_h thanks for the code but its still not exactly what I mean... your code wants to read input from the user

in the end i winged it with...

Code:

echo `cat file.txt` | cut -d" " -f$count > temp.txt
user=`cat temp.txt`

thanks for the help in sorting this out... cheers

Hi nortypig,
If I could suggest a couple of improvements in the code:

Code:

user=`cut -d" " -f$count file.txt`

This does exactly what you are doing, just more efficiently.