I need to parse a simple text file of the following format. email@blah.com username1 email2@blah.com username2 email6@monkey.com username3 The file has a variable number of spaces between the email and username and may or may not have blank lines. I just need to run through it and store the email and username into variables so I can email that person and then loop through to the next email address. Thanks for any help.

In the solution below, awk will process only lines that have 2 or more fields (delimited by any amount of white space) and field1 must contain an at-sign, and creates lines in the format of:   email=email@blah.com uname=username1 Then those lines are piped to a while-loop for processing. awk '\ NF>1 && $1~"@" \   {print "email=" $1 " uname=" $2} ' infile.txt | while read line do eval $line echo "email=$email uname=$uname" # (generate mail here) done

Awesome thank you!