Hey,
I want to assign the output of one comman into a variable to be used in another command.
for example
for each i in `cat /etc/passwd`
do
#the bit that don't work
name= echo $i | ut -f1 -d :
done

I could then use $name for my tasks

any ideas?
Thanks

I'll hazard a guess here. If I wanted to extract the full name field, that is field #5 from each line of /etc/passwd, I would pipe the output of your cat command to awk and ask it to print out only field #5 of each line like this:

cat /etc/passwd | gawk -F: '{print $5}'

Notes:
1. gawk is 'gnu awk'. It will process each line coming in from cat.
2. -F: tells gawk to treat the colon as the input field separator. (The default is a space, so we have to make that explicit).
3. '{print $5}' is the action we want to carry out. If you wanted to print out the first field then change $5 to $1.
4. Once you've extracted the field data you're interested in you can pipe it off to another process or assign it to a shell variable if you like.

Hope this helps.

1 members found this post helpful.

How about $(...) or `...`.

Example:

# set varuiable UPPER to uppercase form of LOWER
UPPER=$(echo $LOWER | tr [a-z][A-Z])
UPPER=`echo $LOWER | tr [a-z][A-Z]`

The backquote (`) is more standard; it appeared in the original bourne shell, and is supported by almost every shell now available.

The $(...) construct is newer, POSIX compliant, and should be used unless you need extreme portability to ancient UN*X boxes. It makes nesting easier.

1 members found this post helpful.

hmm,
I tried

for i in `cat /etc/passwd`
do
name = `echo $i | cut -f1 -d :`
echo $name
done

and I got lots of
name: not found

???

When assigning to a variable, do not put a space between the variable and the assignment ('=').

The shell uses this space to distinguish program invocation (with the first arg a =) from assignment.

1 members found this post helpful.

Ah ha, it works... who said a java programer couldn't learn shell!
lol
Thanks

1 members found this post helpful.