cat command space problem with awk in for loop.
 

Dear all,

I am trying to echo some value using awk, and for reading the file i am using cat command. If there no space in the file content then the following script result correctly.
------------------------------------------------
console: # cat 1
one;two;three;
four;five;six;

console: # cat 2
for J in `cat 1`
do
A=`echo $J | awk -F ';' '{ print $1 }'`
echo $A
done

console: # ./2
one
four
console: #
--------------------------------------------------
In case any space is there in the file 1 then i am facing the problem in the output value .
-------------------------------------------------
console: # cat 1
o ne;two;three;
four;five;six;

console: # cat 2

for J in `cat 1`
do
A=`echo $J | awk -F ';' '{ print $1 }'`
echo $A
done

console: # ./2
o
ne
four
console: #
--------------------------------------------------

Can some one tell me how to omit that space.

Thanks.

The problem is in the statement:
because the shell uses space as field separator, so that the loop is executed three times on the following strings:
1) o
2) ne;two;three;
3) four;five;six;

Anyway, you don't really need such a loop, since awk can parse the content of a file line after line. You can simply do
If you want to remove the blank space, just do something like this:
The gensub statement just replace any space in the first field with the null string.

Regarding the way the shell splits lines, you have to consider the IFS environment variable. From the bash man page:
You can temporarily change the value of IFS in a script to avoid behaviors like that shown above. For example:

why don't you try the tr command?

file_1=`cat 1 | tr -d ' '` # this removes spaces from your file

then use file_1 as your new temporary file like this:

cat $file_1

instead of:

cat 1