arrays and delimiters in ksh

Question

The result of my command is :

> htnnpjhuhj.jbjbnljnkn:tcp:ssh xxx.12234.r444:44056  
> ftpddddddd.jbfffdnkn:tcp:ssh xxx.122555.r674:44067

I am trying to get only the first element in each line before the delimiter ":" That is, I am trying to get htnnpjhuhj.jbjbnljnkn and ftpddddddd.jbfffdnkn . Please tell me what is wrong with my code below.

function myfunc 
{    
   command=$(command)
   IFS=":" read -rA RESULTS <<< $command
   echo ${RESULTS[0]}

}

Answer 1

Assuming the desired output looks like:

htnnpjhuhj.jbjbnljnkn
ftpddddddd.jbfffdnkn

There are several ways to accomplish this ... cut , sed , awk ... the array-based solution mentioned in the question.

It's not clear (to me) how the function is going to be used going forward so I'm going to look at something a bit more direct.

Here's an awk solution that parses the input based on one of two possible delimiters ( space and : ):

$ cat rawdata
> htnnpjhuhj.jbjbnljnkn:tcp:ssh xxx.12234.r444:44056
> ftpddddddd.jbfffdnkn:tcp:ssh xxx.122555.r674:44067

$ awk -F"[ :]" '{print $2}' rawdata
htnnpjhuhj.jbjbnljnkn
ftpddddddd.jbfffdnkn

If the intention is to place all of the values on a single line then we can add a bit more to the awk code like such:

$ awk -F"[ :]" '{printf $2" "} END {printf "\n"}' rawdata
htnnpjhuhj.jbjbnljnkn ftpddddddd.jbfffdnkn

NOTE : This does place an extra space on the end of the output.

Again, plenty of ways to slice-n-dice this but we'll need more details from the OP as to the desired output and if/how the output will be used later on.