Shell Programming and Scripting

In ksh the syntax is:

Code:

while read -A A

It seems to me your original request was space separated, not : separated. Then you can leave out the IFS=":" statement.
If you need the : as field separator a better alternative is to use:

Code:

while IFS=: read -a A

So that IFS is not changed globally and you do not have to set it back to the original value.

A solution that works in both ksh and bash is to use:

Code:

while read line
do 
  A=( $line )
  for i in "${A[@]}"
  do
    printf "$i "
  done
  echo
done < infile

Dear Gopal,
I tried below at my end seems to be working..

Inputs:

$ cat source.txt
aaaa="$col1,$col2,$col3,$col4"

$ var_file_name="1 2 3 4"
$ echo ${var_file_name}
1 2 3 4

$ list="col1 col2 col3 col4"
$ echo $list
col1 col2 col3 col4

Code:

$ echo ${var_file_name} | while read `echo $list`
> do
> . source.txt
> echo $aaaa
> done
1,2,3,4


Last line is the output. (1,2,3,4)

I hope thats what you are looking for.