I am not a Linux scripting expert and I have exhausted my knowledge on this matter. Here is my situation.
I have a list of states passed as a command line argument to a shell script ( e.g "AL,AK,AS,AZ,AR,CA..." ). The Shell script needs to extract each of the state code and write it to a file ( states.txt) , with each state in one line. See below
AL
AK
AS
AZ
AR
CA
..
..
How can this be achieved using a linux shell script.
Thanks in advance.
Use tr:
echo "AL,AK,AS,AZ,AR,CA" | tr ',' '\n' > states.txt
echo "AL,AK,AS,AZ,AR,CA" | awk -F, '{for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++) print $i}';
Naive solution:
echo "AL,AK,AS,AZ,AR,CA" | sed 's/,/\n/g'
I think awk is the simplest solution, but you could try using cut in a loop.
Sample script (outputs to stdout, but you can just redirect it):
#!/bin/bash
# Check for input
if (( ${#1} == 0 )); then
echo No input data supplied
exit
fi
# Initialise first input
i=$1
# While $i still contains commas
while { echo $i| grep , > /dev/null; }; do
# Get first item of $i
j=`echo $i | cut -d ',' -f '1'`
# Shift off the first item of $i
i=`echo $i | cut --complement -d ',' -f '1'`
echo $j
done
# Display the last item
echo $i
Then you can just run it as ./script.sh "AL,AK,AS,AZ,AR,CA" > states.txt (assuming you save it as script.sh in the local directory and give it execute permission)
