Question

First of all, let me state that I am very new to Bash scripting. I have tried to look for solutions for my problem, but couldn’t find any that worked for me.
Let’s assume I want to use bash to parse a file that looks like the following:

variable1 = value1
variable2 = value2

I split the file line by line using the following code:

cat /path/to/my.file | while read line; do
    echo $line      
done

From the $line variable I want to create an array that I want to split using = as a delimiter, so that I will be able to get the variable names and values from the array like so:

$array[0] #variable1
$array[1] #value1

What would be the best way to do this?

Answer 1

Set IFS to ‘=’ in order to split the string on the = sign in your lines, i.e.:

cat file | while IFS='=' read key value; do
    ${array[0]}="$key"
    ${array[1]}="$value"
done

You may also be able to use the -a argument to specify an array to write into, i.e.:

cat file | while IFS='=' read -a array; do
    ...
done

bash version depending.

Old completely wrong answer for posterity:

Add the argument -d = to your read statement. Then you can do:

cat file | while read -d = key value; do
    $array[0]="$key"
    $array[1]="$value"
done