UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi

I am looping through the contents of a file as follows

cat file |while read inrec
do

echo $inrec >> $TMP
done

(obviously this isn't all i am doing as it would be pointless but for the sake of the problem this is the important bit)

The file has fields which are separated by several spaces as follows

1 2 3 4 etc.

When i echo $inrec to screen i see the output as

1 2 3 4 (i.e each bunch of spaces is being treated as one)

This is fine for what i wanted to do.
But now i want to append a number (say 99) onto the end of each $inrec when sending it to the TMP file. So i tried this

echo $inrec$num

But the output shows this
992 3 4

WHen i put speech marks around the variables the output showed

1 2 3 499

but i only need one space as before.

Any ideas.

As I understand you need all the numbers delimited by a space

Did you try this ?

echo "$inrec"" """$num" >> TMP

vino