Hi All,

First of all I just started to learn shell scripting...So, dont be surprised...I have one quick question with regards to parsing the separate fields in a given line(text line). I was able to parse each field for a given line of text regardless of the number of fileds, using the function called function_until(). Now, the for loop basically reads each line of the textfile and passes the line to function function_until. Somebody mentioned to me that I could also use the awk command to parse the fields of each line.

I know a bit of awk command but as far as I know the, I'm only able to use the awk command to parse/extract each field for a given line if only I know exactly how many fields there are in given line. But in a text file, it's a bit unpredictable since we don't know exactly how many fields there are in a given line. Could somebdy please give me suggestion on how to use awk in parsing fields...Thank you in advance...

#!/bin/bash

function_until()
{
until [ -z "$1" ]
do
echo -n "$1"
echo -n " "
echo
shift
done

return 0

}


echo "************Extracting Each Line*************"

text=/home/johnsanty/scripts/textfile



{
for ((a=0 ; a<=2 ; a++))
do
read line1
function_until $line1
done
} < $text

Hi johnsanty,

Are you lookin for this:-

ls -l | awk '{ print $3 }'

Which prints the third fields of the following
-rw-rw-r-- 1 aniruddha aniruddh 21903360 Feb 20 16:40 firefox-1.5.0.1.tar
-rw-rw-r-- 1 aniruddha aniruddh 1312768 Feb 21 10:00 abcd.pdf-rw-rw-r-- 1 aniruddha aniruddh 431149 Feb 21 09:53 bds.zip


ie. the owner of the files:-
aniruddha
aniruddha


Have fun

Imagineers7 is right.

However, although I do not quite understand what you might try to achieve, it could be more simple to use awk anyway.

If you want to read a line from a file and echo it, you could do

Now this is a dull example, because you could use 'cat' as well. However, in your awk script you can process any single line you have read. You can even extract the number of fields in each line.

I learned awk from this manual. It took me a few hours to grab the concept, but then it was easy.

jlinkels

awk has got a "spilt" function that returns an array based on a delimiter which could be your field separator ...

HTH

END

Hi imagineers,

Thank you so much for replying.

Here's what I did.

#####################################
awk '{ print $1 }' number_lines
echo "The number of line is $1"

#####################################

Basically, the number_lines file contains the following:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
3 textfile
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The first line of my code works perfectly but I want to extract the value of the $1, which is 3, and use it in my for loop. I tried different things like the following:

Try1:
##########################################
awk '{ temp=$1 }' number_lines
echo "The number of line is $temp"
#########################################

Try2:
##########################################
awk '{ let temp=$1 }' number_lines
echo "The number of line is $temp"
#########################################

Try3:
##########################################
awk '{ $((temp=$1)) }' number_lines
echo "The number of line is $temp"
#########################################


They all failed. Could you give some hints on how to extract that value of $1. thank you in advance...

Hi jlinkels,

Thanks o much..i'll read the manual..are you sure it took you only few hours...


Thanks again...

Grab value like this:
var=`awk '{ print $1 }' number_lines`
echo $var

To assign a variable the output of a command, you have to use single backquotes (next to the "1" key).

So:
Something tells me you have been using "wc" to count the number of lines in your file, and your piped the output in the file number_lines.

However, if you'd do:

number_lines would only contain the number "3".

Alternatively, you could skip awk and say:
Have you already studied the Advance Bash Scripting Guide?

It'll take you a few hours to grab the concept. A few years before you master it

jlinkels

Hi Chrism01,

Thanks a lot..it worked... Thanks to all who helped me...

Hi Jlinkels,

I have to admit...I'm very impressed. Evrything that you said is true. I read the number of lines in a file and put the information in to another file then I tried to extract the number of lines from that file.

BTW, the Sha-Bang that's what I'm currently reading...Thanks again!!! Thanks to all!!!