cat setting variables

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

hi All
I have a file that has 4 lines:

  1. yesterday's date (mm/dd/yyyy)
  2. yesterday's day- dd
  3. yesterday's month- mm
  4. yesterday's year- yyyy

I want to read this file and place them in variables. how can I do this.

Please help.

thanks in advance!!

KS

2

you can try a for loop.

3

I want the lines to be placed in seperate variables... could you kind enough to provide me with the commands?

KS

4

well in perl you can do it this way.

#! /usr/bin/perl -w

$FILE="test.file";

open FILE, "$FILE" or die "NO GO ($!)";

foreach (<FILE>) { chomp; push @contents, $_; };
foreach (@contents) { print $_,"\n" };

each element of the array contents has a line of the file

so:
$contents[0] has "mm/dd/yyyy"
$contents[1] has "dd"
$contents[2] has "mm"
$contents[3] has "yyyy"

to do it in shell scripting

#! /bin/ksh

i=1
file=test.file

for line in `cat test.file`;do
        if [ $i == 1 ]; then
                var1=$line
        elif [ $i == 2 ]; then
                var2=$line
        elif [ $i == 3 ]; then
                var3=$line
        elif [ $i == 4 ]; then
                var4=$line
        fi
i=$(($i+1))
done
echo VAR1=$var1
echo VAR2=$var2
echo VAR3=$var3
echo VAR4=$var4

both scripts are under the assumption that the file contains the following data

mm/dd/yyyy
dd
mm
yyyy