Hi Guys, I'm new to sheel scripting in linux and having some trouble with the following. I have a file that is in the format var1=xxx var2=yyy var3=zzz what I want to do is parse this line by line and then export each as a shell variable to use in other scripts. I've taken a look at awk to do it and I can get each portion of it out using awk -F"=" '{print $1;print$2}' /root/server.cfg however from here im stuck getting it to then export the variables to the shell. I guess I have 2 questions. can i export these variable out of the awk command to the shell? and is awk the right tool for the job? dave

If you are saying that you are new to shell scripting in Linux, exporting a variable is simple. bash includes the export command. Simply add a line to export your variables as follows: var1=xxx var2=yyy var3=zzz export var1 var2 var3 See the manual page for export in a terminal window with: man export HTH, Ernie Registered Linux User 247790 ICQ 41060744

In a shell script, if the data is of the format var=something, it's customary to use the eval command: #!/bin/bash while read line do eval $line done < myfile echo $var1 echo $var2 echo $var3

Thanks guys. However, I think i was a bit unclear I have a server.cfg file that will have a number of variables in it that are specific to the build of a host. These will be used during the post install scripts that are required to run for configuration or installation of software on the host. This file will be in the format i specified above, but the number and names of the variables may change between each server depending on what is required to be on that server. this file will ultimately be generated by another system so I cant just set them in each script, they need to be centralised in the single server.cfg So what I want to do at the start of each my customisation scripts is call a little piece of code that will read through each line of the server.cfg, then set (export) each one as a variable and then my script can run and use what ever variables it requires. I understand how to set variables its just the handling of this file and parsing it to set each one until the eof.

ok i think i have accomplished it with the following #!/bin/sh # Extract all variables from server.cfg cat $serverconfig | sed 's/^/export /' > $varsscript # Make the script executable chmod +x $varsscript source $varsscript <more code inserted here>

There's always more than one way of doing things. eval still does the trick: #!/bin/bash while read line do eval "export $line" done < myfile.txt echo $var1 echo $var2 echo $var3 BTW, when sourcing a file, I see no reason to make the file executable. Every shell I've worked with, csh, sh, ksh the file only has to be readable.