My script when run
./program < "$1" | awk -F '!' '{print $3 $4, $5, $6, $7}
returns the values
900 200 30 400 5
51 31 2 3 4
How do I set a variable for the colummns for each line I have attempted
LINE=`./program < $1`
for i in $LINE
do
$LINE | awk -f '!' | read a b c d e <<< "$(echo $i | cut -f4 -d:}'
but no matter how I do it I can't seem to get values into variables
You can use process substitution to read these values for each line of output from awk:
while read -r a b c d e; do
echo "<$a><$b><$c><$d><$e>"
done < <(./program < "$1" | awk -F '!' '{print $3 $4, $5, $6, $7}')
In fact since awk is only printing columns delimited by ! you can even remove awk completely:
while IFS='!' read -r a b c d e; do
echo "<$a><$b><$c><$d><$e>"
done < <(./program < "$1")
for i in $LINE
will loop over the tokens in LINE. You can modify IFS to make a token equal a line, but then you might as well
./program <"$1" |
while IFS='!' read -r a b c d e f g _; do
echo "<$c$d><$e><$f><$g>"
done
Other problems with your attempt:
LINE is not a good variable name. Use lowercase variable names; uppercase should be regarded as reserved for the shell's special variables.
Your process substitution attempted to use the loop variable $i outside the loop, but that's not possible; it will be undefined.
LINE is not a command name, so its standard output cannot be piped into awk. To pass a string to Awk, do echo "$LINE" | awk or, in Bash only, a here string: <<<"$LINE" awk
You have a double redirection to read. It can't read standard input from both the pipe and the here string; the here string will win. But in this case, because read is at the end of a pipeline, it will run in a subshell, and lose its value when the subshell exits. (You can avoid this in Bash. See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/024 for a discussion.)
You had mismatched brackets in $(echo ... | cut ... }
You should double-quote the string in echo "$i" (although in this isolated case, it might actually have worked). Generally, unless you specifically require the shell to perform wildcard expansion and token splitting on a variable's value, you should double-quote it.
No done to close the for ...; do block.
IFS='!' read a b c d e < <(./program < "$1")? EDIT: Since there are multiple lines in the output of./program, you need a while loop aroundread!-delimited values in the output fromprogram, butcut -f4 -d:looks like you want to extract the fourth out of a list of colon-delimited fields. Which is correct? Or do you have!-delimited fields inside:-delimited fields?