concatenate two variables in bash

Question

I wanted to concatenate two variables, but it seems that there is some overwriting.

#!/bin/bash
NUMBER1=$(seq 1 900 | sort -R | head -1)
FIRST=$(sed -n ''$NUMBER1'p' names.txt)
echo ${FIRST}
echo "${FIRST}${NUMBER1}"

Where names.txt is a list of names. For example when I run this code, I get the output as,

Gregoria

159goria

Notice $FIRST was partially overwritten by $NUMBER1 .

The correct output should have been,

Gregoria

Gregoria159

can someone please help me ? Thanks

Your input file has CR+LF line endings. Run dos2unix or some other utility to remove CRs. For example, dos2unix names.txt might help. — devnull
– devnull, Commented Mar 15, 2014 at 4:56

rici · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-15 04:57:07Z

2

Your names.txt file has Windows line-endings, CR-LF. The CR (carriage return) is not being recognized as part of the new-line sequence by sed, so it stays on the end of the line Gregoria<CR>; consequently, the next characters get overprinted at the beginning of the line.

Use dos2unix or some equivalent to fix the line endings.

answered Mar 15, 2014 at 4:57

rici

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2 Comments

rici Over a year ago

What you change are the line-endings. How you change them, if you have dos2unix installed, is dos2unix names.txt. For a lot of elaboration, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline

glenn jackman Over a year ago

alternative to dos2unix: sed -i 's/\r$//' filename

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