UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi all,

This is my first post here, so please bear with me!

I have a file coming into a korn shell script, fixed length. Example:

Peter (25 spaces) D (29 spaces) Younan (24 spaces)
Jim (27 spaces) (30 spaces) Shue (26 spaces)

I am performing a while loop to read in the file and assign each record to a variable called THELINE. I then try to assign the various columns by doing an echo and piping into cut. Example:
FIELD1=`echo $THELINE | cut -c1-15` # FIRST NAME
FIELD2=`echo $THELINE | cut -c16-45` # MIDDLE NAME
etc

What's happening is echo is compressing the "extra" white spaces between the name fields, so FIELD1 looks like this:
Peter D Younan
instead of this (desired):
Peter


Any ideas on how I can get around this issue?

Thanks!
Pete

Try :

Code:

FIELD1="`echo $THELINE | cut -c1-15`" # FIRST NAME
FIELD2="`echo $THELINE | cut -c16-45`" # MIDDLE NAME

Jean-Pierre.

Thanks J.P!

Whenever you want to retain extra spaces use "". like echo "$theline".

FIELD1=`echo "$THELINE" | cut -c1-15` # FIRST NAME
FIELD2=`echo "$THELINE" | cut -c16-45` # MIDDLE NAME

Thank you both very much. This helped me considerably!
Pete