> I understand the correct way to do this is probably awk, or perl or sed or ... but i would use awk, too :-)
> but not sure how to make it work in this case. For example, I > could put the code in a bash function, but then how do I > access the function from inside the awk command? you could only call another script from inside the awk script. > The key thing > here is that my /bin/sh code has variables which I would like > to read/write from inside the loop. this is basically impossible. environment variables are inherided by children, but cannot be given back. a nice workaround for this is something like that: #! /bin/bash bashfn() { eval $(awk '{print "var=val1 var2=\"this is a value\""}') } bashfn echo $var $var2 works pretty well ... remember to export the variables, if they need to be inherited by called progs. good luck! -- Hi! I'm a .signature virus! Copy me into your ~/.signature, please! -- Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand. -- Become part of the world's biggest computer cluster - join http://www.distributed.net/