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I am working on a bash project. I need to get all the values (one at a time because I will be using them somewhere else) from a text file. The text file I will be getting is structured like this:

Report:
-----------
Name  Column1  Column2  Column3  Column4
row1  val1     val2     val3     val4     
row2  val5     val6     val7     val8     
row3  val9     val10    val11    val12

There are no fixed amount of rows and columns so I will need something general. How do I retrieve each val one by one in bash? Thanks.

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Does the val means any value(a combination of numbers or letters)? –  Avinash Raj Jun 18 '14 at 17:10
    
@AvinashRaj Yes a value can be either a number, letters or combination of both –  Alias Jun 18 '14 at 17:11
    
Please don't crosspost... –  jasonwryan Jun 18 '14 at 19:43

2 Answers 2

up vote 2 down vote accepted

You can process content of a file line by line, using bash while loop:

i=1

while IFS= read -a line; do
  printf "Line number %d:\n" $i
  printf "%s\n" "${line[@]}"
  let i++
done < "file.txt"

Each line is stored in array line, you can get each element of array line by syntax:

echo "${line[n]}"

where n is the order of element in array.

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up vote 1 down vote

And through awk command,

$ awk '/^Report|^-----|^Name/ {next}{for (i=2;i<=NF;i++){print $i}}' file
val1
val2
val3
val4
val5
val6
val7
val8
val9
val10
val11
val12

It skips the line starts with Report,---,Name and it prints all the values from the second column to the end for each line. The values are printed in a newline.

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