Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi Gurus

I am very new to Unix Shell Prog. I have a file in format

Q1 Dirname-FileName Score Remarks

i.e. containing columns separated by space. I want to read Column 1 and 2 and then join them to make a string that would be a path to a file. I will use this string to fetch the files and copy in a directory..

If someone can help plz. I have no idea what commands to use??
thanks in adv

Hi,

try out the below script:

Assumtion:
If your file is /home/test.txt and contents of the file are:

/home/test test1
/home/test test2

like

dirname filename

The below script shud work.. let me know if you have any questions

#!/bin/ksh
no_of_lines=`cat /home/test.txt|wc -l`
no_of_lines=`echo $no_of_lines | sed 's/" "/''/g'`
while [ $no_of_lines -gt 0 ]
do
dirname=`head -$no_of_lines /home/test.txt | tail -1 | cut -f1 -d' '`
filename=`head -$no_of_lines /home/test.txt | tail -1 | cut -f2 -d' '`
slash=/
path=$dirname$slash$filename
cp $path /home/test_dir
no_of_lines=`expr $no_of_lines - 1`
continue
done
exit 0

Huh? That's a really convoluted way of saying

Code:

while read dir file rest; do
  echo "$dir/$file"
done </home/test.txt

hi era,
that was a very good solution...
can u tell me if that works if the file is comma delimited.. or any other delimiter is used other than space.
can u tell me how to do if it is comma delimited?

Thanks,

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