Little formatting help needed.

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I have a following string.

"machine=IFLMUD5HP0581&group1=Stop"

I have created 2 variables namely machine and action.

machine should contain
IFLMUD5HP0581
action should contain
Stop

How do i write a script for the same.

2

amit@softpc142108 ars $ echo "machine=IFLMUD5HP0581&group1=Stop" | cut -d '=' -f2 |cut -d '&' -f1
IFLMUD5HP0581
amit@softpc142108 ars $ echo "machine=IFLMUD5HP0581&group1=Stop" | cut -d '=' -f3
Stop

3 
 echo "machine=IFLMUD5HP0581&group1=Stop"|sed 's/.*=\(.[^=]*\)\(.*\)\(&.[^=]*\)=\(.[^=]*\)/\1 \4/' 

 echo "machine=IFLMUD5HP0581&group1=Stop"|sed 's/.[^=]*=//;s/&.[^=]*=/ /'
4

use eval :

STRING="machine=IFLMUD5HP0581&group1=Stop"
eval ${STRING#*&}
eval ${STRING%&*}
echo "machine = $machine - group1 = $group1"
5

Try this:

echo "machine=IFLMUD5HP0581&group1=Stop" |awk -F"[=&]" '{ print $2,$4}' | read machine action

echo $machine
echo $action
6

Thank you very much for all of your support.

7 
awk -F '=' '{ print $2 " "$3}' filename | awk -F '&' '{ print $1}'

awk -F '=' '{ print $2 " "$3}' filename | awk '{ print $2}'
8 
IFS="&"
        while read line;do
        set $line
        while [ $# -gt 0 ];do
          eval $1
          shift
        done
        done < yourfile
        echo $machine
        echo $group1