[Techtalk] weirdness piping to a variable

[Peggy Russell]

> name and assign it to the piped sequence of commands in backticks, but 
> that's always felt clumsy to me, especially if the chain of piped 
> commands was long. 

Hi Miriam,

Here's a possible option to address the look:

  a=$(echo "quick brown fox" |
      cut -d' ' -f2)

The pipe `|` is also considered a continuation character.

Have you worked with index or associative arrays in bash.
They might might work for your processing. IFS is very
powerful in separating words. And then there is a slew
of powerful parameter expansions. And don't forget
regular expressions and BASH_REMATCH.

A Few Bash Resource Favorites
=============================
1) Bash man page

   NOTE: Change the format:
    * Create PDF doc from man: man -t bash | ps2pdf - bash.pdf
    * Create HTML doc from man: man --html=firefox bash
    * Create TEXT doc from man: man bash | col -b | kate -i

2) Bash Reference Manual GNU (info page)
   http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html

3) Bash change log
   http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/bash/CHANGES

   NOTE: Could also look at installation package
         rpm -q --changelog bash |less

4) Greg Wooledge's Bash Pitfalls, Bash FAQ, Bash Guide
   http://mywiki.wooledge.org/

5) Linux Doc Project - Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide
   http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/abs-guide.html


1) Book - Writing shell scripts
   http://linuxcommand.org/writing_shell_scripts.php

2) Handling filenames
   http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.html

3) Bash One-Liners Explained
   http://www.catonmat.net/blog/bash-one-liners-explained-part-one/

4) A lot of good articles on bash here (i.e., Bash by example, Part 1-3)
   http://www.ibm.com/search/csass/search/?q=bash

5) The Architecture of Open Source Applications - The Bourne-Again Shell 
   by Chet Ramey
   http://www.aosabook.org/en/bash.html

Peggy Russell