LinuxQuestions.org - [SOLVED] problem with ' set $(cat crpage)'

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problem with ' set $(cat crpage)'

I have several lines of text that I want to sort by line and display

Code:



#!/bin/bash 

crpage="

                              NEW YORK

                        HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

                                  1916

                      [several more lines...] 

                    J. R., L. E. W., and L. T. S.,

                  without whose help this small record

                      could not have been written."



        IFS=$'\n'

        set $(cat crpage) 

        echo $1

        echo $2

        echo $15

exit



The proble is $1 and $2 show the first and second ine but $15 shows:

NEW YORK5

In other words line 1 !!



Ie tried quotes with no success. Any ideas?

Positional parameters larger than 9 need to use the full variable form: "${15}".

And from now on, please use [code][/code] tags around your code, to preserve formatting and to improve readability.

Thankyou
My first post didn't know about [code][code] ,should have RTFM
Frank
P.S.
I have now added code tags

Not to worry. It's common with newcomers.

Although I would've put the ending tag after the last line of code instead of the end of the post. ;)

A couple more things to comment on:

You can usually use redirections instead of cat when accessing file contents. In this case you can use:

Code:

set $( <crpage )

Personally, I don't like using set/shift with the positional parameters. I prefer to use arrays instead. Bash v.4 even has a new mapfile built-in that makes it easy to load lines from a file into an array.

Code:



mapfile -t arr <crpage    #-t removes the trailing newline

    

#or for earlier versions of bash:

#IFS=$'\n'

#arr=( $(<crpage) )



echo "${arr[0]}"          #you should generally quote variable expansions

echo "${arr[1]}"          #especially when they can contain spaces

echo "${arr[14]}"          #and other shell-reserved characters

There's no need to fool with IFS this way either (at least, not with v.4). The only thing you have to remember is that arrays are 0-indexed, so you need to subtract one from each line number to reference it. :)

(Or mapfile also has an -O option, which lets you set the index start number to whatever you want.)