Field separators and iterators

The internal field separator (IFS) is an important concept in shell scripting. It is useful for manipulating text data.

An IFS is a delimiter for a special purpose. It is an environment variable that stores delimiting characters. It is the default delimiter string used by a running shell environment.

Consider the case where we need to iterate through words in a string or comma separated values (CSV). In the first case, we will use IFS=" " and in the second, IFS=",".

Getting ready

Consider the case of CSV data:

data="name,gender,rollno,location" 
To read each of the item in a variable, we can use IFS. 
oldIFS=$IFS 
IFS=, # IFS is now a , 
for item in $data; 
do 
    echo Item: $item 
done 

IFS=$oldIFS

This generates the following output:

Item: name
Item: gender
Item: rollno
Item: location

The default value of IFS is a white-space (newline, tab, or a space character).

When IFS is set as , the shell interprets the comma as a delimiter character, therefore, the $item variable takes substrings separated by a comma as its value during the iteration.

If IFS is not set as , then it will print the entire data as a single string.

How to do it...

Let's go through another example usage of IFS to parse the /etc/passwd file. In the /etc/passwd file, every line contains items delimited by :. Each line in the file corresponds to an attribute related to a user.

Consider the input: root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash. The last entry on each line specifies the default shell for the user.

Print users and their default shells using the IFS hack:

#!/bin/bash 
#Desc: Illustration of IFS 
line="root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash"  
oldIFS=$IFS; 
IFS=":" 
count=0 
for item in $line; 
do 

     [ $count -eq 0 ]  && user=$item; 
     [ $count -eq 6 ]  && shell=$item; 
    let count++ 
done; 
IFS=$oldIFS 
echo $user's shell is $shell;

The output will be as follows:

root's shell is /bin/bash

Loops are very useful in iterating through a sequence of values. Bash provides many types of loops.

• List-oriented for loop:

        for var in list; 
        do 
            commands; # use $var 
        done 

A list can be a string or a sequence of values.

We can generate sequences with the echo command:

echo {1..50} ;# Generate a list of numbers from 1 to 50.
echo {a..z} {A..Z} ;# List of lower and upper case letters. 

We can combine these to concatenate data.
In the following code, in each iteration, the variable i will hold a character in the a to z range:

      for i in {a..z}; do actions; done;

• Iterate through a range of numbers:

        for((i=0;i<10;i++)) 
        { 
           commands; # Use $i 
        }

• Loop until a condition is met:

The while loop continues while a condition is true, the until loop runs until a condition is true:

        while condition 
        do 
            commands; 
        done

For an infinite loop, use true as the condition:

• Use a until loop:

A special loop called until is available with Bash. This executes the loop until the given condition becomes true. Consider this example:

        x=0; 
        until [ $x -eq 9 ]; # [ $x -eq 9 ] is the condition 
        do 
            let x++; echo $x; 
        done