Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 09:17:17 -0500 From: Lucas Bergman <lucas@slb.to> To: Don O'Neil <don@whtech.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Help w/ Awk Message-ID: <20010517091717.A634@billygoat.slb.to> In-Reply-To: <MOBBIPGJKBNNPGLGMFHFCEIFHCAA.don@whtech.com>; from don@whtech.com on Tue, May 15, 2001 at 07:08:10PM -0700 References: <20010516115758.L26110@welearn.com.au> <MOBBIPGJKBNNPGLGMFHFCEIFHCAA.don@whtech.com>
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> 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).
Lucas
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