Hi, I have a string called name1=value1. I am struggling to write a awk/script to get the "value1" into some variable. Could some one help me... plzzzzz

Any number of unix tools can solve this problem: #!/bin/ksh myvar=$(echo "name1=value1"|awk ' BEGIN { FS="=" } { print $2 } ') echo $myvar You can use the ksh pattern matching operators to do the same thing: var="name1=value1" x=${var#*=} echo $x In the above example, anything and an equal sign is deleted from the string.

Thank you very much for your help.. it helped me very much. I have extension of this problem, I need to search in a file config.xml for <user>scott</user> and replace the value "scott" with different value "xyz". The final output of the config.xml is <user>xyz</user> Is there any way to search and replace in the config.xml without renaming it.

When using the traditional unix tools such as awk, sed, tr, etc. you have no option but to rename the file after processing finishes. I'm not much of a perl programmer, but I know that perl has an option that allows editing a file without renaming it. Perhaps some of the other modern scripting languages like php and ruby do the same?