UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have an output that I get from while read, I want to display it as the following, please help.

Original output from while read line loop:
This is my client=1
client version=2.3.4
OS version=4.5
This is my client=2
client version=1.5.6
OS version=6.7

I want it to look like this with ";" between them except the last one:
This is my client=1;client version=2.3.4;OS version=4.5
This is my client=2;client version=1.5.6;OS version=6.7

Dala,

Can you show us what you have attempted so far?

Regards

programName | perl -pe 's/\n/;/g; s/;/\n/ if $_ =~ /OS version/i'

this is my code....
#!/bin/sh

syr_report()
{
while read -r line
do
case $line in
ClientOS*|MPFSrev*) echo -e $line | awk -v ORS=";" '{print} END { printf "" }';
esac

done < mpfsinfo
}

# Call function here
syr_report

Do you have this in bourne shell????

Lets plan the whole thing a little, then it will be easier to understand:

1) we get information chunks and read them in the while-loop bit by bit. We have to set up a data structure to hold all the various pieces of information until we are ready to print it out wholly (to print a line).

2) There should be a certain condition defined for what makes the information "complete": is it that all the various pieces are there? (Have you "fields", which have to be filled and once all are filled the line is complete?) Is a line complete once a certain field is read? (in your case "OS version" is always the last field - is this what you intended or is this just by chance?)

3) What do you do with error conditions? What happens if you read i.e the following lines:

This is my client=2
client version=1.5.6
client version=1.6.7
OS version=6.7

or how about this:

This is my client=2
client version=1.5.6

You should be able to recognize such conditions and handle them somehow. Maybe incomplete records are OK (then you will have to find out somehow when an incomplete record ends), maybe they are not and your script should report an error.

Please answer these questions and then i will proceed to show you how this is implemented.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

This output I get is from a server command, the output from the server command is consistant, the client name and the next 3 lines are the client information. From the server command I might have more than one client. I need to replace the fourth comma with a new line using sed.