Dear all, Anyone can give me some direction on it? Here is my file content, aaaaa:bbbbb:ccccc:ddddd 11111:22222:33333333:444 zzzz:dddd:eee:eee how do i read each column into specific variable with delimeter ":"?? Here my script,anyone can give me some direction on it? #!/bin/bash while read v1 v2 v3 v4 do ....... done < text.txt

hi, You can do like this: #!/bin/bash while read buf do v1=`echo $buf|cut -d: -f 1` v2=`echo $buf|cut -d: -f 2` ....... done < text.txt

Change the field separator, IFS: #!/bin/bash while IFS=":" read v1 v2 v3 v4 do printf "%s %s \n" $v1 $v2 done < text.txt

In awk, use the -F flag awk -F: '{ print $1 " " $2 " " $3 " " $4 }' text.txt

Dear all, Really sorry to everyone about that actually this solution have been solved by nail and posted before, but i didn't search deeply so that this msg can be consider is a duplicate message! Thanks you to everyone who give a hand on it.