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I have a database in PostgreSQL called customers, customers has a table called CustomerInfo. CustomerInfo contains 3 colunms ID, Name and address. I would like to write a bash script to get the information from the CustomerInfo table but i am not sure how to access the individual rows once i have the results of the query. Here is the script i have written:

#!/bin/bash  

results=`psql -d customers -c "select * from CustomerInfo where name = 'Dave'"`

echo $results['name']

The query runs correctly and returns the correct results but the echo command will just print everything in results. I know this is not the correct way of doing this, does anyone know of a way to get the query results as an array, or would i just have to write my own function for parsing the results?

Thanks!

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1  
The effort needed to do that sort of thing with bash is better spent learning Perl basics. –  Daniel Vérité Dec 2 '13 at 12:38
    
Before trying to write anything yourself you have to realize what you are doing here: Executing a command and storing its output(text) in a variable. Therefore you would need to parse and disassemble that text in order to make this thing work. –  mistapink Dec 20 '13 at 7:43

3 Answers 3

up vote 1 down vote

You can store your results into an array and loop through it using a while loop.

psql -d customers -c "select * from CustomerInfo where name = 'Dave'"
| while read -a Record ; do
    # ${Record[0]} is your ID field
    # ${Record[1]} is your Name field
    # ${Record[2]} is your address field
done
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up vote 0 down vote

You can't. You have to write your own function for paring the query results. Backtick( ` ) will execute the command and returns the output. In your case, results will have output of your query.

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up vote 0 down vote

If I were tasked with doing this (really, Perl is better, take the advice of @daniel-verite), here is what I would do.

  1. Get a list of column names by piping the initial results through head
  2. Create a function which parses the rest using awk into a useful format.
  3. sed or awk to extract the relevant information from a row.

Now, the above assumes no embedded newlines (which would complicate things)

This amount of effort is anything but trivial. You really are better off learning Perl for a task like this.

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