Question

I have a long running program, my_prog that has some output that I want to parse to get two variables, $start and $end. Here’s what the output might look like:

Important data between the first set of pipes|3|a|
This line is not interesting to me|5|c|
...
Another line with data (at the end this time)|4|b|

In the example above, I just need:

start=3
end=b

I’m using this in a bash script. I have a feeling awk can totally solve this issue, but doing a start=$(my_prog|awk ...) will give only one variable. I guess I could do a my_array=($(my_prog|awk ...)), but that just seems messy. Also, I don’t want to put the (possibly long) output of my_prog into a variable. What’s a good, simple way to get that data? Can awk somehow write directly to the bash variables?

Answer 1

as @Zack wrote awk script is ok, the only improvement could be:

read start end < <(my_prog | 
  awk -F\| 'NR==1 { start=$2 } END { print start " " $3 }')