Question

I am writing ksh script to parse a pipe delimited string

export dummy="abc"  
echo "123|456|789" | awk '{split($0,output,"|"); print output[3] output[2] output[1]}'

above code seems to work , but I am not able to assign value of output[3] to dummy.

Is there a way to do such parsing, but I want to assign the parsing result in a variable within ksh space i.e. dummy (in above sample)?

Answer 1

The shell can do it:

line="123|456|789"
IFS='|' read a b c <<END
$line
END
echo $c  # => 789