OT: shell scripting problem

[Rick Stevens]

Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> Am Mi, den 18.05.2005 schrieb linux.whiz at gmail.com um 0:55:
> 
> 
>>My brain is fried.  I know there is a simple answer to this but I'm
>>drawing a blank.  I want to run a script against the contents of a
>>text file.  The text file is just my users' first name, middle initial
>>and last name like this:
>>
>>John A Smith
>>Mary P James
>>Sally R Jones
>>Fred Q Davis
>>
>>What I want to do is for each user in this file, run a script.  I
>>tried to do this:
>>
>>for i in `cat textfile`; do
>>  myscript.sh $i
>>done

Remember that, by default, bash thinks spaces separate fields.  You
could add a couple of lines such as:

	OLDIFS=$IFS
	IFS=$'\n'

to the beginning of your script to change the field separator to just
newline (by default, it's "<space><tab><newline>").  Don't forget to
clean that up via:

	IFS=$OLDIFS

at the end of the script (not really necessary, but one should clean up
after oneself).
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-     Is that a buffer overflow or are you just happy to see me?     -
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