Shell Programming and Scripting

yeah thanks.
i guessed the code will be like this.

Thanks again.

I think i get it: you have a configuration file, which contains several declarations, all of the form IDENTIFIER=VALUE. You want these identifiers to become part of your environment and you to export them so that all forked processes inherit them.

The solution is way easier than you thought: first step is to get these declarations to your environment:

Code:

. /path/to/declaration_file

This will execute declaration_file in the current environment and since "IDENTIFIER=VALUE" is a perfectly legal statement, which creates/populates a variable your declarations will create the variables with the correct content. You can use the exportall capability of the Korn shell to have these variables exported automatically (see "man ksh" for the necessary flag, i have no ksh manual at hand as i write this). The complete code would look like:

Code:

set -<export_all_flag>
. /path/to/declaration_file
set +<export_all_flag>

If you want to do it all "by hand" as an alternative you can do the following: read in the declaration file, line by line, split each line at the "=" character to extract the identifier part and use a loop to set each variable and export it utilizing a generous dose of "eval":

Code:

cat declaration_file | while read chLine ; do
     $chLine
     eval export ${chLine%%=*}
done

I hope this helps.

bakunin

PS: On a sidenote and for the special edification of colleague era i'd like to expand on the "cat" above: i like my while-loops head-driven because it is easier to debug when they are longer. This is why i always write "cat file | while ...." instead of "while ... done < file".

A second reason is that in this case i would try to improve on the robustness of the declaration file format by making empty lines, comments, trailing/leading blanks and the like possible. In a real-world script of mine the passage would probably look like this:

Code:

sed 's/#.*$//
     s/[<spc><tab>]*=[<spc><tab>]*/=/
     s/^[<spc><tab>][<spc><tab>]*//
     s/[<spc><tab>][<spc><tab>]*$//
     /^$/d' file |\
while read chLine ; do
     ...etc.