while it may seem simple i can't figure this and and i don't wanna complicate it with python. I'm trying to get 2 variables from a "cat file.txt" in a loop. For just one variable it's simple:
for i in `cat mylist`; do
echo ${i}
done
In this example we have just one word per line.
I need to make 2 separate variables from a line that contains 2 words/numbers per line separated by tab or space.
root@hostname#cat iplist
192.168.0.1 device1
192.168.0.2 device2
192.168.3.2 device3
Use a while loop, and let read split the variables:
while read -r a b; do
# do stuff with "$a" and "$b"
done < file
\t, with -r it will remain like this in the variable, without -r it will be converted to a tab.
-r the characters \t get converted to t, not a tab (try it). Same with others like four characters \r\n get converted to rn.read does the `\` stripping by default. SFAIKT it has always done so (goes back to the 1980s), but I cannot find a source which says why it was done like that.