While read loop only processes the first line;

Question

I have a file with multiple lines and want to do the following with each line..

Set three variables from an awk output.
Do something with the variable data (in my example, echo them).

My script successfully does what I want it to, however only for the first line of the file.

#!/bin/bash

while read LINE; do
set -- $(awk -F";" '{print $1, $2, $3}')
var1=$1
var2=$2
var3=$3

echo $1
echo $2
echo $3

done < /path/file

Sample of file data:

NPK;20140325;272128;4579
NPK;20140329;272826;4977
NPK;20140320;271832;4248
NPK;20140415;273213;6698
NPK;20140406;272703;5708
NPK;20140408;272204;5811
NPK;20140324;271966;4465
NPK;20140401;272507;5253
NPK;20140403;272638;5487

Any ideas?

cheers M

mklement0 · Accepted Answer · 2014-04-17 02:15:37Z

4

Your awk statement has no explicit input, so it consumes the rest of the stdin input - the remaining lines of your input file.

You must pass the $LINE variable explicitly to the awk command, which you can do with a here-string, namely <<< $LINE:

while read LINE; do

  set -- $(awk -F";" '{print $1, $2, $3}' <<< $LINE)
  var1=$1
  var2=$2
  var3=$3

  echo $1
  echo $2
  echo $3

done < /path/file

However, you could greatly simplify your loop by letting read do all the parsing:

while IFS=\; read var1 var2 var3 unused; do

  echo $var1
  echo $var2
  echo $var3

done < /path/file

edited Apr 17, 2014 at 2:15

answered Apr 17, 2014 at 1:52

mklement0

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