Assistance with regex and config files

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I am trying to write a shell script that will such in data from a config file. The script should mount device nodes that are contained in a config file in the following format:

# filesystem type         # read/write  #device         # Mount Point
xfs                            w                 /dev/sda1      /mnt
ext3                           r                 /dev/hdc        /mnt1

I then want to place the data into a variable so I can do something in the script like so:

mount -t xfs w /dev/sda1 /mnt

I need to have comments in the config file so need to ignore them when sucking in the configuration.

So, assuming that I have a config file as formatted above named mounts.cfg and the following shell script:

FILE="./mounts.cfg"

while read line
do
        if [ -z "echo $line | sed '/^ *#/d;s/#.*//'" ]
        then
                next;
        else
                mount -t echo "$line | sed '/^ *#/d;s/#.*//'`";
        fi
done < $FILE

but it gives me errors as apparently even though I am using sed to get rid of commented lines the variable still has some value associated with it. There has to be a better way to do this? any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks

Phil

2

With awk you can achieve that as follow:

awk 'NR > 1{print "mount  -t " $1 " " $2 " " $3 " " $4}' "./mounts.cfg" | sh

Try this first to see if you get the desired command.

awk 'NR > 1{print "mount -t " $1 " " $2 " " $3 " " $4}' "./mounts.cfg"

Regards