Re: Read command and trailing spaces

From: Chris F.A. Johnson (c.fa.johnson_at_rogers.com)
Date: 10/09/03 

Date: 9 Oct 2003 10:49:16 GMT

On Thu, 09 Oct 2003 at 09:43 GMT, Diego Balgera wrote:
> Hi,
> I have a script that reads a whole text file as follows:
>
> while read ROW
> do
> (processing ROW)
> done
>
> The ROW is a fixed-length row of 913 characters. Usually it works ok but
> when the row ends with spaces, the ROW doesn't contain them. In other words,
> the read command cuts the trailing spaces (since "read" interprest spaces as
> variable separators).
> Could you please suggest a method to avoid this, so that ROW will always
> contain all the 913 characters, trailing spaces included?

     Set the field separator, $IFS, to an empty string, so that read
     doesn't use spaces as a separator, e.g.:

while IFS= read ROW
do
   ## process $ROW
done 

-- 
    Chris F.A. Johnson                        http://cfaj.freeshell.org
    ===================================================================
    My code (if any) in this post is copyright 2003, Chris F.A. Johnson
    and may be copied under the terms of the GNU General Public License

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