In the ETL world, it is always a need for processing the delimited files. While reading a delimited file can be done through all the scripts and programming languages, we will see how this can be done in a shell script using the cut command
Syntax
$(cut -d "|" -f1 <Delimited file> | tr -d '[:space:]')
cut -d “|” => This is to tell the command that the delimiter is “|” for this operation
-f1 <Delimited file> => This will read the first column from the delimited file
tr -d ‘[:space:]’ => This will delete the extra spaces at the end of the values
Let us see it with a real-time example. In the following example, we will see how to read the delimited content and assign it to variables. The sample file is “delimitedfile.txt”
delimitedfile.txt
$ cat delimitedfile.txt 1|Sankar|Sales|2020=08-01|Chennai
Let us see a shell script that reads and displays the above-delimited file.
filereader.sh
export sourcefile="delimitedfile.txt"
echo "Source file to read = $sourcefile"
echo "Program to read delimited file starts..."
export id=$(cut -d "|" -f1 ${sourcefile} | tr -d '[:space:]')
export name=$(cut -d "|" -f2 ${sourcefile} | tr -d '[:space:]')
export department=$(cut -d "|" -f3 ${sourcefile} | tr -d '[:space:]')
export joineddate=$(cut -d "|" -f4 ${sourcefile} | tr -d '[:space:]')
export city=$(cut -d "|" -f5 ${sourcefile} | tr -d '[:space:]')
echo ""
echo "ID : $id"
echo "NAME : $name"
echo "DEPT : $department"
echo "JOINED ON : $joineddate"
echo "CITY : $city"
echo ""
When you run the above script you will see the result as follows.
$ sh filreader.sh Source file to read = delimitedfile.txt Program to read delimited file starts... ID : 1 NAME : Sankar DEPT : Sales JOINED ON : 2020=08-01 CITY : Chennai
Also check “How to iterate string list using for loop in shell“