Collect awk output in bash script for processing

Question

I have a loop in a bash script that processes a number of files in a folder. In my loop, for each file, I execute the below line:

awk -F":" '{ print "Name: " $1 "\t\tID:" $3 }' $file

I would like to collect the output of all the files processed in some bash variable/array for other processing outside the loop. How can I achieve this in bash?

Answer 1

This can be easily done using shell script array:

i=0
for file in file1 file2 ....; do
    output[$i]=$(awk -F":" '{ print "Name: " $1 "\t\tID:" $3 }' "${file}")
    i=$((${i}+1))
done

Answer 2

In a similar sense to a0f3dd13 you could use associative arrays. They could be useful here especially when it comes time to retrieve the data.

Associative arrays can use a string for their index rather than an integer (they're basically hash maps), so you can more easily retrieve the data.

declare -A output
for file in file1 file2 ....;do
    output["$file"]=$(awk -F":" '{ print "Name: " $1 "\t\tID:" $3 }' "${file}")
done

Then to retrieve data you can use:

echo "${output[file1]}"

This would output the results you got from file1