How do I write output of a command to multiple text files where the file names are based on part of the command output?

Question

I have a command that outputs a few lines of text to the console in this format: <FILE_NAME>: <STRING_VALUE>. Example:

FILE1: abc1
FILE2: def2
FILE3: ghi3

I want to create files, FILE1,FILE2 and FILE3 with the contents of abc1,def2 and ghi3 respectively.

Something like

echo "text" >> FILE1

but have it do recursively

What is a single one-liner command to do this?

@tink Oh, I thought I add in a bit more detail. What I meant was doing echo "text" >> FILE1 but on multiple lines of output. — DmcZx
– DmcZx, Commented Aug 6, 2021 at 1:48

tink · Accepted Answer · 2021-08-05 01:28:42Z

1

Just pipe your command to awk:

command | awk -F ': *' '{print $2 > $1}'

We define the field separator to be F ': *' (colon followed by any number of spaces).

We print the second field of each row and redirect it to the value of the first field.

$ ls
FILE1  FILE2  FILE3
$ cat FILE*
abc1
def2
ghi3

answered Aug 5, 2021 at 1:28

tink

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2 Comments

This is perfect! Thank you!

Welcome. And I just saw the edit in your question; you can, of course, also use the >> in awk ...