CODEWITHSUNDEEP
arraysbashawk
Allan
Allan

Reputation: 1272

Trouble with AWK'd command output and bash array

I am attempting to get a list of running VirtualBox VMs (the UUIDs) and put them into an array. The command below produces the output below:

$ VBoxManage list runningvms | awk -F '[{}]' '{print $(NF-1)}' 

f93c17ca-ab1b-4ba2-95e5-a1b0c8d70d2a
46b285c3-cabd-4fbb-92fe-c7940e0c6a3f
83f4789a-b55b-4a50-a52f-dbd929bdfe12
4d1589ba-9153-489a-947a-df3cf4f81c69

I would like to take those UUIDs and put them into an array (possibly even an associative array for later use, but a simple array for now is sufficient)

If I do the following:

array1="( $(VBoxManage list runningvms | awk -F '[{}]' '{print $(NF-1)}') )"

The commands

array1_len=${#array1[@]}
echo $array1_len

Outputs "1" as in there's only 1 element. If I print out the elements:

    echo ${array1[*]}

I get a single line of all the UUIDs

( f93c17ca-ab1b-4ba2-95e5-a1b0c8d70d2a 46b285c3-cabd-4fbb-92fe-c7940e0c6a3f 83f4789a-b55b-4a50-a52f-dbd929bdfe12 4d1589ba-9153-489a-947a-df3cf4f81c69 )

I did some research (Bash Guide/Arrays on how to tackle this and found this with command substitution and redirection, but it produces an empty array

while  read -r -d '\0'; do
        array2+=("$REPLY")
    done < <(VBoxManage list runningvms | awk -F '[{}]' '{print $(NF-1)}')

I'm obviously missing something. I've looked at several simiar questions on this site such as:

Unfortunately, none have helped. I would apprecaite any assistance in figuring out how to take the output and assign it to an array.

I am running this on macOS 10.11.6 (El Captain) and BASH version 3.2.57

Upvotes: 1

Views: 63

Answers (1)

peak
peak

Reputation: 116710

Since you're on a Mac:

brew install bash

Then with this bash as your shell, pipe the output to:

readarray -t array1

Of the -t option, the man page says:

-t     Remove a trailing delim (default newline) from each line read.

If the bash4 solution is admissible, then the advice given e.g. by gniourf_gniourf at reading-output-of-command-into-array-in-bash is still sound.

Upvotes: 1

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