Re: Setting Multiple Shell Variables from One Run of awk

["Mumia W.." <paduille.4061.mumia.w+nospam@earthlink.net>]

On 09/30/2008 01:48 PM, Martin McCormick wrote:
> 	Right now, I have a shell script that does the following:
>
> hostname=`echo $NEWDEV |awk 'BEGIN{FS="."}{print $1}'`
> domain=`echo $NEWDEV |awk 'BEGIN{FS="."}{print $2}'`
> top0=`echo $NEWDEV |awk 'BEGIN{FS="."}{print $3}'`
> top1=`echo $NEWDEV |awk 'BEGIN{FS="."}{print $4}'`
>
> 	That looks inefficient (dumb) so I ask, is there a way
> to assign the fields in an awk expression to shell variables as
> one runs awk once?
>
> 	Being able to do that would mean one run of awk instead
> of the 4 shown here and, if file accesses are involved, there is
> only one of those.
>
> 	Thanks.
>
> Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
> Systems Engineer
> OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group

The bash shell can do this internally since it supports arrays:

NEWDEV=${NEWDEV//./ }
NEWDEV=($NEWDEV)
echo "hostname: ${NEWDEV[0]}"
echo "domain: ${NEWDEV[1]}"
echo "top0: ${NEWDEV[2]}"
echo "top1: ${NEWDEV[3]}"

Of course you're free to assign the array elements to variables if you 
desire. See "man bash" for more about arrays.