awk print question

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hello, I have an input file like

123,456,789,321,654,987,IN,OUT,2012,000075,CF34EQ

It has 11 fields separated by comma. I am trying to do this

while read string
do
  var=$(echo $string | awk -F"," '{print $1,$2,$3,$4,$5,$6,$7,$8,$9,$10,$11}') 
  set -- $var
echo $1
...
...
echo $10
echo $11
done < $tmpdir/appended.dat

Everything goes well, the output is OK until it reach $10 and $11. Then the output is 010 and 011 instead of 000075 and CF34EQ. Can you help, please?

Thanks!

2

You don't need to use awk here, the special IFS variable controls variable splitting, just use it.

OLDIFS="$IFS"
IFS=","

while read LINE
do
        set -- $LINE # Splits on ,
done < inputfile
IFS="$OLDIFS"

Using pure builtins should make the code literally hundreds of times faster, too.

You might need to use ${10} and ${11}

1 Like
3

Thanks a lot!

4

You can also set IFS local to the read command, then you do no need to record and reinstate the old IFS value:

while IFS=, read string
do
  set -- $string
done < inputfile

You need to use curly brackets ( ${10} ) for elements higher then nine other $10, otherwise it get interpreted as $1 with a 0 appended..

1 Like