Parsing string on multiple parts without separator

Question

115:wc -l:find . -iname "*test*":find /tmp/ -iname "*test*"

I would like to parse the string above.

In my case, a string consists of 4 columns (every command has : separator) but it can be much longer. I want to "pull out" all the commands including initial number, starting with 115 and continuing with wc -l, -iname "*test*", find /tmp/ -iname "*test*" ... always without : separator.

My variable $var should get those values:

var= 115 , var= wc-l , var= find . -iname "*test*" , var= find /tmp/ -iname "*test*"

My code:

while read line;
 do
 while [[ $var -ne '0' ]];
   do
    var=$( echo $line | cut -d ':' -f$i )
    i=$( expr $i + 1 )
    echo $var
   done
done <$1

I read lines from file and with second while I cut columns until empty one. Obviously, there is something wrong because echo do not print anything.

Answer 1

Here is your script fixed to work the way I think you meant it to work:

i=1     
while read line;                        
  do     
  while :; do 
    var=$( echo $line | cut -d ':' -f$i )                                   
    i=$( expr $i + 1 ) 
    [[ "$var" != "" ]] || break
    echo $var
  done     
done <$1

A couple of remarks:

• i was not initialized
• var was not initialized either, so the inner loop would not execute even once
• I'm not sure what [[ $var -ne '0' ]] tests, but I think comparing $var to an empty string is better.
• As a consequence, if there is an enpty field (i.e. two consecutive colons), this script will terminate there

A more robust way of doing the same thing is:

while read line; do
  num_fields=$(echo $line|awk -F':' '{print NF}')
  for (( i=1; i <= num_fields; i++ )); do
    var=$( echo $line | cut -d ':' -f$i )
    echo $var
  done
done <$1