looping through a variable in a shell script

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

hi,

my first question is :-

i would like to know how do i loop through the output of a variable.

for ex:- if i have a variable called x and echo $x gives the output like

feb 19 07

feb 20 07

feb 21 07

i would like to know how do i loop through this since it is separated and i woul be using this output elsewhere also.

My second question is :-

how do i merge two outputs which can be looped.

example :-

i have the output in one file as

xyz|123|27|feb|2003

wer|342|23|feb|2005

sde|143|30|feb|2006

the output of the second file is

99991231 feb 15
20061121 feb 23
20060915 feb 25

now i would like the final output to be

xyz|123|27|feb|2003|99991231 feb 15

wer|342|23|feb|2005|20061121 feb 23

sde|143|30|feb|2006|20060915 feb 25

thanks a lot in advance.

2

You would not get that output from 'echo $x'; you might get it from 'echo "$x"' (note the quotes).

What exactly is the content of "$x". Use this to see it:

printf "%s\n" "$x"

If you want to loop through each word in the variable:

for var in $x
do
   printf "var=%s\n" "$var"
done

If there are multiple lines in the variable, and you want each line separately, change IFS to a newline and then use a for loop:

IFS='
'
for var in $x
do
   printf "var=%s\n" "$var"
done

IF you want to merge line 1 from file1 with line 1 from file2, and line 2 with line 2, etc., use paste:

paste -d\| file1 file2