How can i pipe the ouput variables of CUT command to another command

Question

I want to do something like this:

cat files_list | cut -d' ' -f1,3 | mysql -uroot -pxxxx -e "insert into table(var1, var2) values($f1,$f2)"

How can i achieve this thing?

Answer 1

You can use the following bash script:

while read -a record ; do 
    mysql -uroot -pxxxx -e "insert into table(var1, var2) values(${record[0]}, ${record[2]})"
done  < files_list

However, this is simple but performs not very well.

If the task is performance critical, I would build just a single mysql query, which inserts all rows at once, or even better: use LOAD_DATA_INFILE

Also note, if the task is security critical, meaning the input data comes from an untrusted source, I wouldn't use the command line mysql client at all. Using a programming language which supports prepared statements for mysql - like PHP - would be the way to go.

Using a programming language would had another important advantage - you wouldn't need to pass the password via commandline which is insecure.