How can I assign output to two bash arrays variables

Question

There are vaguely similar answers here but nothing that could really answer my question. I am at a point in my bash script where I have to fill two arrays from an output that looks like the following:

part-of-the-file1:line_32
part-of-the-file1:line_97
part-of-the-file2:line_88
part-of-the-file2:line_93

What I need to do is pull out the files and line numbers in there own separate arrays. So far I have:

read FILES LINES <<<($(echo $INPUTFILES | xargs grep -n $id | cut -f1,2 -d':' | awk '{print $1 " " $2}' with a modified IFS=':' but this doesn't work. I'm sure there are better solutions since I am NOT a scripting or tools wizard.

chepner · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-05 16:21:52Z

5

read cannot populate two arrays at a time like it can populate two regular parameters using word-splitting. It's best to just iterate over the output of your pipeline to build the arrays.

while IFS=: read fname lineno therest; do
  files+=("$fname")
  lines+=("$lineno")
done < <(echo $INPUTFILES | xargs grep -n "$id")

Here, I'm letting read do the splitting and discarding of the the tail end of grep's output in place of using cut and awk.

edited Oct 5, 2015 at 16:21

answered Oct 5, 2015 at 16:09

chepner

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1 Comment

glenn jackman Over a year ago

@jnbbender, if this is then answer, accept it

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