Script for Managing the Contacts
Learn how the read command can process files.
We'll cover the following
Using read
Let’s consider that contacts.txt
contains the following content.
Alice=alice@gmail.com
Bob=(697) 955-5984
Eve=(245) 317-0117
Mallory=mallory@hotmail.com
Here is an example to read the first line of the contacts.txt
file. The following command does it:
read -r contact < contacts.txt
This command writes the Alice=alice@gmail.com
string to the contact
variable.
We can write the name and contact information to two different variables. We need to define the equal sign as a delimiter to do that. Then, we will get the following read
call:
IFS=$'=' read -r name contact < contacts.txt
Now, the name
variable gets the “Alice” name. The e-mail address comes to the contact
variable.
Let’s try the following while
loop for reading the entire contacts.txt
file:
while IFS=$'=' read -r name contact < "contacts.txt"
do
echo "$name = $contact"
done
Unfortunately, this approach does not work because it’ll accidentally create an infinite loop. This happens because the read
command always reads only the first line of the file. Then, it returns the zero exit status. The zero status leads to another execution of the loop body, which then leads to another zero status, and so on in a continuing cycle.
We should force the while
loop to pass through all lines of the file. The following form of the loop does it:
while CONDITION
do
ACTION
done < FILE
This form of the loop can handle keyboard input too. We need to specify the /dev/tty
input file for doing that. Then, the loop will read keystrokes until we press Ctrl+D.
Here is the corrected while
loop that reads the entire contacts.txt
file:
while IFS=$'=' read -r name contact
do
echo "$name = $contact"
done < "contacts.txt"
This loop prints all lines of the contacts file.
There is the last step left to finish our script. We should write the name
and contact
variables to the associative array on each iteration. The name
variable is the key and contact
is the value.
The file while-contacts.sh
shows the final version of the script for reading the contacts from the file. We can execute the file on following commands:
./while-contacts.sh "Alice"
./while-contacts.sh "Bob"
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