Any unix scripters out there?
 

Trying to figure out something that should be simple.

Have read a file and am looping through each line which is read into a $LINE variable OK.

Now, what I want to do is split that $LINE variable into it's constituent parts. The delimiter is a space.

Using ksh.

#There's gotta be a simple easy way to do this shirley.

http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.split.php

will that do it?

From memory, you would want to use awk or sed (havent done scripting for around 8 years though!

And then what, do you want to process each 'word'?

(sh/ksh)
for WORD in $LINE
do
echo $WORD
done

Or do you want to look at the 5 field?

echo $LINE | cut -d' ' -f5

Or you can use 'nawk' (or awk)

echo $LINE | nawk -F' ' '{print $5}'

Plus loads of other ways... hopefully the above might help..

why not split each line into an array?

Because that'll use loads of memory if it's a big file. For this stuff you need perl rather than shell/awk/sed because it was designed for it:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

open FILE, '/path/to/file' or die $!;
while (defined (my $line = <FILE>)) {
my @fields = split /\s+/, $line;
# @fields is an array of the line split on one or more whitespace
... do whatever with it
}
close FILE or die $!;

Here you go this should do what you want:

while read LINE
do
echo $LINE | awk '{print $1}' >> /tmp/fname
echo $LINE | awk '{print $2}' >> /tmp/sname
done < /tmp/test

As tested on AIX ver 5.3 ML1 in KSH

The script above is an example of having first name and surname in a ascii text file.

$1 = First Name
$2 = Surname

The script makes the assumption that you want to show 2 fields from each line in the ascii text file.

Agreed Perl is the best for this - is it me or does it actually not say what he wants to do with the 'fields' once he has them... Could make a difference to how complex or simple a script he needs...

if he is new to Unix, perl might be a little scary too... (Sorry don't know your background D.)

And finally - Steve stop showing off ;)

s/.+e\/?.(e)n (.+t(...))/\/ \10\10Just another Perl hacker/; :D

Cheers chaps, got it working. Small file so the awk command did the job. I use Perl for large files but in this instance it would have been overkill.

It also depends if the Pearl module is installed as well. Or running Pearl scripts would not be an option.

It's spelled perl :) You don't need to use any non-core modules for simple things, I only used pragmata.

D'oh! :lol1:

Although it depends on which platform he is coding on. I suppose for LINUX distros, Perl is included. But on some UNIX O/ses you have to make sure it has been installed with the BOS.

Yeah, AIX is different to Solaris / Linux in that way.

Indeed it is :thumb: