Hi all, I should write a shell script able to parse a comma separated string. An examle: x,x,x,x,x The problem is that the number of different 'x' is not known so how can I get avery separated x string ? Then I should write each x on a different line of a text file. Does a unique command exist or a script is necessary ? I would appraciate very much any help! Thank You, Irene

You could parse it with awk. echo "x,x,x,x,x" | awk -F"," '{ print NF }'

If the field count is unimportant but you just want to deal with the values of each field, the tr command could be used to translate commas to carriage returns. cat comma.txt File Server = pippo,pluto,paperino File Server = bob,mary,bart,jim,buford awk '{ print $NF }' comma.txt | tr "," "\012" pippo pluto paperino bob mary bart jim buford Redirect stdout to append to a file if you want to save the results. You can process many files in a for loop. for file in *.log ; do awk '{ print $NF }' $file | tr "," "\012" >> outfile done

looks homeworky to me. If instructor required "pure shell" (no awk,sed ,tr ) and file contains pippo,pluto,paperino bob,mary,bart,jim,buford you could submit: Script < file where Script is: IFS=, while read a do for f in $a do echo $f done done for production, David's is the best way.