UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

It isn't that you were lucky; the script using lpstat will work perfectly. However, using:

Code:

for printer in `lpstat -p | awk '{print $2}'`

takes more system resources and runs slower than using:

Code:

lpstat -p | while read junk printer junk

But if you need to process lines of output from awk that contain more than one "word", the default word splitting performed by:

Code:

for variable in ...

won't work (as you found out using the output from awk '{print $0}' and found that you were processing individual words instead of entire lines).

On the other hand, read can be used in a while loop to process individual words, entire lines, or groups of individual words from lines that are being read.