Issues with cut

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

We are running on a Sun cluster using ksh.

We have a script that has been running for about six months with no issues. The script has not been modified and our results are now coming out diffrent.

<BEGIN>
cat $exfile | while read line
do

                    revnpa=\`echo $line |cut -c 1-10 | sed '/\\n/!G;s/\\\(.\\\)\\\(.

*\n\)/&\2\1/;//D;s/.//'`
wtn=`echo $line |cut -c 1-10`
name=`echo $line | cut -c 11-25`
orig=999
wkfile=$workdir/OUT
insert=I

    echo $revnpa$insert$wtn$name$orig &gt;&gt; OUT

<END>

The $exfile is a file that 26 bytes including /n
The name variable for whatever reason is deleting trailing white spaces rather than grabbing the full 15 bytes. We have verified using od that the spaces due in fact exist in the input file but are dropped during the variable assignment. Command line works fine but not in script. Shell is defined on first line

Thanks for any assistance

2

If that code really used to work either line had a typeset or there was a non-default IFS in force. My guess is that IFS changed somehow.

$ echo "a          " | read avar ; echo ${#avar}
1
$ IFS=""
$ echo "a          " | read avar ; echo ${#avar}
11
$