CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashshellifs
user6656104
user6656104

Reputation: 51

Shell syntax IFS

I'm trying to run a simple shell script example:

STR="qwe;ert;rty;tii"
IFS=';' read -r NAMES <<< "$STR"

This is giving me the following error message:

syntax error: got <&, expecting Word

I'm not exactly sure why this isn't working. I thought the syntax I used was correct and I tried comparing to other examples and I saw the syntax was almost identical.

Any feedback would help

Thanks

Upvotes: 0

Views: 375

Answers (1)

Charles Duffy
Charles Duffy

Reputation: 295443

This is MKS bash, not GNU bash. It's not really bash, and doesn't support the genuine shell's syntax.

There are perfectly good (...well, reasonably adequate) builds of GNU bash for Windows. Use them.

Particularly, in real bash, to split a semicolon-separated string into an array of names:

str='qwe;ert;rty;tii'
IFS=';' read -r -a names <<<"$str"

...which you can then verify with

declare -p names

or emit one-to-a-line with

printf '%s\n' "${names[@]}"

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions