Question

I have a file containing a number of lines as follows

source destination pattern

the pattern may have *.* also

When I read this pattern into a variable PATTERN using

cat $FILE_NAME|while read item
do
    arr=($item)
    PATTERN="${arr[2]}"
    echo "$PATTERN"
    done

then the output is some file in the working directory. How can I store “*.*” in PATTERN ?

Answer 1

By doing it the right way in the first place.

while read -a arr
do
    PATTERN="${arr[2]}"
    echo "$PATTERN"
done < "$FILE_NAME"