Shell Programming and Scripting

I need to merge data from more than one file and I am using

while read line_record
do
field1=`echo $line_record | awk -F "," '{ print $1 }'`
echo $line_record >> $outFile

if [ "$field1" = "qualifier1" ]
then
while read new_linerec
do
echo $new_linerec >> $outFile
done < $File2
done < $File1

File 1 and File 2 contains indented data in it and after executing this code; the new file outFile contains all records with truncated spaces, tabs, etc...

How can I retain the original format of data when copying it to output ?

quotes...see the man page for your shell to understand the behaviour of echo and why it does this, and the section on quoting for why this makes a dfference.

Quoting is just a part of the problem.
The read statement removes leading and trailing spaces (for standard Input Field Separator) :

Code:

$ cat in.dat
1111111
    55555555
       8888888
 2222222
1111111
$ cat in.ksh
while read line
do
   echo "$line"
done < in.dat
$ in.ksh
1111111
55555555
8888888
2222222
1111111
$

The solution is to clear or to force the Input Field Separator to another value.

Code:

$ cat in.ksh
while IFS= read line
do
   echo "$line"
done < in.dat
$ in.ksh
1111111
    55555555
       8888888
 2222222
1111111
$

Jean-Pierre.

Thanks, Jean-Pierre.

Your solution did work.