Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 20:06:23 -0500 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: Lucas Bergman <lucas@slb.to> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Help w/ Awk Message-ID: <15108.30095.521591.799161@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <108340844@toto.iv>
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Lucas Bergman <lucas@slb.to> types:
> > That's a simpler way of doing it, but doesn't accomplish what I'm trying to
> > do. I'm trying to be able to loop through each user and get it's UID/GID and
> > do stuff...
> >
> > My problem wasn't with my AWK statement, but with my for/next loop.
> >
> > For whatever reason (still unknown), the for Line in Password was failing,
> > and was returning multiple lines, like there were EOL's embedded in the
> > lines.
>
> You're right. The shell assumes the argument to 'for' is a list, a
> string that it breaks into list elements at _any_ whitespace, not just
> newlines. So, if your /etc/passwd lines had whitespace in them (and
> they frequently do in the GECOS field), they would get broken in the
> middle.
>
> A previous response already pointed out a solution, passing the file
> to awk, which iterates over whole lines by default. You can use the
> shell's 'read' also:
>
> while read line; do
> # operate on "$line"
> done </etc/passwd
>
> See sh(1).
You can combine this with pipes to get AWK to parse your password line
for you as well:
awk -F: '{ print $1 " " $3 " " $4 } ' /etc/passwd |
while read line
do
set -- $line
# Operate with $1, $2 and $3 set to 1st, 3rd and 4th fields from passwd
done
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.
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