Hi, I need to know the best way to parse a textfile that contains the following text

00010000001M
00010000001Q
00040000001M

I would like to parse the first 8 characters and store it in a variable , then the next 3 characters and store it in a variable and so on and so forth, then loop to the next line. Can i do that in Korn?

Use the cut command to parse the text lines:

#!/bin/ksh

while read line
do
c=$(echo "$line" | cut -c1-8)
v=$(echo "$line" | cut -c9-11)
echo $c
echo $v
done < file