CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bash
Alexis King
Alexis King

Reputation: 43872

Use space-delimited string as argument list

I have a string that contains something like this:

apple orange pear grapes

And I have a command that works like this:

eat food [additionalFood [additionalFood [additionalFood...]]

If I do eat $s, then it will treat the whole string as one big food. How can I break up the string into passable arguments?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3868

Answers (3)

algot
algot

Reputation: 2438

I'd use for construction and awk for this.

Upvotes: 0

c00kiemon5ter
c00kiemon5ter

Reputation: 17654

If eat is not your direct script, use set. try help set in your terminal

set: set [-abefhkmnptuvxBCHP] [-o option-name] [--] [arg ...] Set or unset values of shell options and positional parameters.

example:

$ allargs="foo bar baz"
$ set -- $allargs  # notice no quoting here
$ echo "$1"  # foo
$ echo "$2"  # bar
$ echo "$3"  # baz

If eat is the direct script, then $1 $2 are alread set for you, unless your arguments are quoted

$ eat foo bar baz 
## then "$1" is foo, "$2" is bar etc
$ eat "foo bar baz"  # quoted arguments
## then "$1" is "foo bar baz"

More options would include a for loop, see @Oli Charlesworth answer,
or even an array:

$ arr=($allargs)    # allargs as defined above, also no quoting 
$ echo "${arr[0]}"  # foo
$ echo "${arr[1]}"  # bar
etc

Upvotes: 1

Oliver Charlesworth
Oliver Charlesworth

Reputation: 272667

It shouldn't treat that as one big string. Example:

test.sh

#! /bin/bash
for stuff; do
    echo "XXX: $stuff"
done

Command-line

chmod +x test.sh
s="apple orange pear grapes"
./test.sh $s

Output

XXX: apple
XXX: orange
XXX: pear
XXX: grapes

If this isn't working for you, it's possible your IFS variable is set to a non-default value.

Upvotes: 4

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