Looping thru tab delimited data

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hello people,
Can you please tell me how to loop thru the contents of a variable having tab delimited data using for loop in KSH.

For example:
data1 data2 data3 data4

How can I access the above data in a for loop? Please let me know. Thanks.

Regards,
T.

2

Got the solution. A simple for loop worked. thanks.

Regards,
T.

3

Willing to share it? :slight_smile:

4

Here it is:

files=`ls -1 $dir`

for file in `echo $files`
do
echo $dir/$file
done

-- I wanted to list the files in a folder and use that list for further processing. Instead of taking the filenames into a file, I take it into a variable. The filenames here are tab delimited.

Regards,
T.

5

You certainly don't need to create "ls" and "echo" processes since KSH enables you to get your file list right from the for loop.

for file in $dir/*
do
     echo $file
done

This produces the same output with simpler logic.

6

The reason I was doing it that was for my code I need the filenames in bare format i.e just the file name without path.
Maybe I will use the basename function to extract just the filename.

Thanks tmarikle.

7

Or again, without using another process and using a KSH built in capability:

for file in $dir/*
do
   echo ${file##*/}
done

This will do the same as basename.