Hello, If i have the following in a unix script: echo "Enter the full path: \c" read PATH The user will input something like: /mike/hobbies/football How can I now take the variable PATH that the user inputted with the full path and parse it so I can save each directory path to a seperate variable, for example I will want to accomplish this in my script: Path1=mike Path2=hobbies Path3=football Where Path1, Path2, Path3 are unix variables I want the user input to be saved. Basically how do I parse it and not store the / Thanks

tr and awk should do the trick, so something like this: Path1=`echo $PATH | tr "[/]" "[ ]" | awk '{print $1}'` Path2=`echo $PATH | tr "[/]" "[ ]" | awk '{print $2}'` Path3=`echo $PATH | tr "[/]" "[ ]" | awk '{print $3}'` So you are replacing / with an empty space and then using awk to specify which field you want to read.

or after changing slashes to spaces, you could just pipe it into a read command: echo $PATH | tr "[/]" "[ ]" | read Path1 Path2 Path3 remainder

I would suggest that, but my shell provider runs an old version of KSH so that pipe to read does not work :)

Bummer! I use that a lot. Also, NeedHelp did not say if the number of slashes in the path can vary. If so, the following code would assign the segments to path1, path2, path3, etc. n=0 for word in `echo $mypath | tr "[/]" "[ ]"` do n=`expr $n + 1` eval path$n=$word done

I wish I could, oh well. I just make do with what I have.

Hows about this... path="/usr/spool/lp/interface" var1=`echo $path | awk -F'/' '{ print $2 }'` var2=`echo $path | awk -F'/' '{ print $3 }'` var3=`echo $path | awk -F'/' '{ print $4 }'` ??? Obviously $1 will be the bit before the first / so will contain nothing. Sean