Grab fields without awk

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

so i want to avoid external calls in my script, so im trying to do the following:

AllMyLogs="hello---nallo---wello---bollo
tello---zello---jello---kello"

OLDIFS="$IFS\\\n"
IFS="---"
set -- ${AllMyLogs}
IFS="$OLDIFS"

I want it to work in a way that, when i type this:

echo $2

I get:

nallo
zello

basically, id like to pick the field/column that i want to grab, without having to use awk. Any ideas??

I want this to work on any unix os, so the solution would have to be portable.

2

That isn't the way IFS works. Every character in $IFS is treated as a field separator; it is not an ERE as in FS in awk .

And, that isn't the way set -- works. There is only one set of positional parameters, not one set for each <newline> character encountered in the arguments passed to set .

But (assuming that the text between your --- field separators does not include any - characters), you could try something like:

printf '%s\n' "hello---nallo---wello---bollo
tello---zello---jello---kello" |
while IFS='-' read -r junk junk junk data junk
do	printf '%s\n' "$data"
done
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