Shell Programming and Scripting

Help needed - I am sure there is something to do with tabs or white space that is killing me here..

I have a file that is generated from an oracle sql script - when I cat the file I see the below

601888725 14-AUG-08-10:20 3
601888726 14-AUG-08-10:37 1
601888727 14-AUG-08-10:37 1
601888728 14-AUG-08-10:49 3

What I want to do is to read in the file in a 'for' command so I can read each row/column.

When I use the following command I would expect to see 4 lines returned:
for row in `cat tempfile`; do echo $row; done

However - the output I get is:
601888725
14-AUG-08-10:20
3
601888726
14-AUG-08-10:37
1
601888727
14-AUG-08-10:37
1
601888728
14-AUG-08-10:49
3


Why is this happening and what can I do to work around it?
I want to know that id 601888725 - has date of 14-AUG-08-10:20 and group of 3 - but cannot read this is in properly....

The use of cat in backticks and echo to print the lines back out is more likely to be the source of your problem. Maybe the following works more like you would hope and expect.

Code:

while read row; do
  print "$r"
done <tempfile

> cat split_for.ksh
for row in `awk '{printf "%s\n%s\n%s\n",$1,$2,$3}' split_for.txt`
do
echo "$row"
done

> cat split_for.txt
601888725 14-AUG-08-10:20 3
601888726 14-AUG-08-10:37 1
601888727 14-AUG-08-10:37 1
601888728 14-AUG-08-10:49 3

> sh split_for.ksh
601888725
14-AUG-08-10:20
3
601888726
14-AUG-08-10:37
1
601888727
14-AUG-08-10:37
1
601888728
14-AUG-08-10:49
3

Dear frustrated1,

Your "problem" is that for regards line break as any other whitespace separator so every word is counted... instead try something like

Code:

while read line; do echo $line;done < tempfile

And You can take it from there, ie split $line in the parts You want them


/Lakris


PS I have to add; of course for works just as well, if You know that the format of input is consistent, You can use arrays or just a indexed loop, since every third $row is a number, every third a date, etc.

A related complication is that some variants of echo will do its own backslash interpretation and what not. That's precisely why ksh has print -- use that instead.