Hi all, anyone feel like enlightening a beginner-shell-scripter?

The section of code I'm stuck on is supposed to take a (unspecifed) number of field titles - for a latex table. This is my code as it stands:

field=""
fieldnumber=0

until [ "$field" = "done" ] ; do

read field

fieldnumber=$((fieldnumber + 1))

field$fieldnumber="\"$field\""

done

Here's the bit that really confuses me! When I run the scrip and enter, say, 'example' BASH returns:

field1="example": command not found

obviously if I type that command directly into the BASH prompt it works fine. I thought that a shell script should work in exactly the same way as if you type it straight into the prompt - so why the error?

Any ideas would be appreciated. Cheers, Chris.

Hi, Chris.

Most interpreted languages provide 2 features that control scanning. One is some kind of escape mechanism that says "don't look at the enclosed text for anything special"; this is often a set of quote marks. The other, often eval, says "look at this chunk again".

For your code, I added the eval and an eval of an echo. The echo, being a print statement, is often your best debugging tool:
which, when run, produces:
If you are going to post code here often, please use the CODE tags -- highlight, then click "#".

For this problem, you might want to consider using an array, q.v.

Best wishes ... cheers, makyo

( edit 1: addition )

Thanks Makyo. I hadn't noticed the CODE button - I'll use it in future!

C

eval field$fieldnumber="\"$field\""

FYI, to increment a variable, this works in bash.
((fieldnumber++))

$ AA=1;((AA++));echo $AA
2