Parsing data and retaining the full length of variable

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Here's is an example of what I want to do:

var1="Horse "
var2="Cat "
var3="Fish "

for animals in "$var1" "$var2" "$var3"
do
set $animals
pet=$1
## Ok, now I want to get the values of $pet, but
## I want to retain the full length it was originally in
## var1, var2 or var3, say it was 10 bytes. If I then do
## the following:
echo "$pet : "
The printing of this(the colons in this example) will not line up:
Horse :
Cat :
Fish :

I think I have done this before, but it is Friday and my brain is fried.....any help would make my weekend!

Thanks

2

you need to double quote all those variables carrying animals including the positional parameter $1...

try this...

    var1="Horse     " 
    var2="Cat       " 
    var3="Fish      " 

    for animals in "$var1" "$var2" "$var3"
    do
       set "$animals"
       pet="$1"
       echo "$pet :"
    done

Cheers!
Vishnu.

3

"Thanks"

4

Also, see if you have the printf command... it's internal in some shells, and can be found as a standalone binary on some systems. You can specify field width...