1

I'm struggling a bit with this task, for example I can do a simple loop to send variables values into a file with for loop. But how to get something before output of the variable value? I did something like this as a workaround:

list="$1\n$2\n$3"
varNames=$'var1=\nvar2=\nvar3='


for i in $varNames $list; do
    echo -e $varNames$list > "vars-$(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H.%M).file"
done

But I cant get the loop correct to iterate through out every item in both lists,but the output I'm getting is:

var1= var2= var3=$1
$2
$3

As above $1,$2,$3 are correct values of variables that I created before. What I'm missing in this loop? Is it good way to create two lists or it can handled by some sed afterwards?

Thank you!

AdminBee
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Dawid
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    Welcome to the site. Could you check the example code you showed us? For example, you loop using a variable i but you never use it in the actual loop. Currently, you would simply execute your echo statement as many times as there are elements in $varNames and $list – AdminBee May 11 '20 at 09:28
  • Sorry I made an error while editing. Now the output is right. What i want to accomplish is to have var1=$1 and so on in new lines respectively.
    – Dawid May 11 '20 at 09:31
  • Thank you, I'll check out how goes with array keys and I hope it will work out! – Dawid May 11 '20 at 09:44

1 Answers1

3

There are almost as many issues as you have lines in your script, I try to go through one by one, at each step assuming everything else is working as intended.

1.

list="$1\n$2\n$3"

This won't work, because the \n will not be replaced by newline, you would need something like this:

list="$1"$'\n'"$2"$'\n'"$3"

or 

list="$1
$2
$3"

2.

for i in $varNames $list; do

Assuming you fixed (1), this loop will run 6 times (Disclaimer, see last sentence of this). One time for each of $varNames and $list, which I don't think is intended. Also, when you loop like this, the variables will not be split by newline, but by $IFS. It defaults to newline, space or tab. So it works, but knowing that, you could also just use list="$1 $2 $3" in (1). This only works of course, if you know each of these variables don't contain any of newline, space or tab.

3.

echo -e $varNames$list

outputs the whole variables and not just the split up parts which would be $i.

4.

You overwrite the whole file for each iteration. Better use

for ...; do ... done > file

So what now?

I think you cannot easily fix your code as is. Instead, you should use bash arrays and iterate over the keys:

#!/bin/bash

list=("$1" "$2" "$3")
varNames=("var1" "var2" "var3")

for k in "${!varNames[@]}"; do
    printf '%s=%s\n' "${varNames[$k]}" "${list[$k]}"
done > "vars-$(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H.%M).file"

I prefer using printf (see this), but you could also use echo like this instead if you don't care ...

echo "${varNames[$k]}=${list[$k]}"
pLumo
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