Question

I put together this shell script to do two things:

1. Change the delimiters in a data file (‘::’ to ‘,’ in this case)
2. Select the columns and I want and append them to a new file

It works but I want a better way to do this. I specifically want to find an alternative method for exploding each line into an array. Using command line arguments doesn’t seem like the way to go. ANY COMMENTS ARE WELCOME.

    # Takes :: separated file as 1st parameters
    SOURCE=$1

    # create csv target file
    TARGET=${SOURCE/dat/csv}
    touch $TARGET

    echo #userId,itemId > $TARGET

    IFS=","
    while read LINE
    do
        # Replaces all matches of :: with a ,
        CSV_LINE=${LINE//::/,}
        set -- $CSV_LINE
        echo "$1,$2" >> $TARGET
    done < $SOURCE

Answer 1

Instead of set, you can use an array:

arr=($CSV_LINE)
echo "${arr[0]},${arr[1]}"