On Aug 2, 2007, at 11:58 PM, John Baxter wrote:

> As to your missing whitespace, you could try replacing the
> echo $i
> with
> echo "$i"
>
> That has to be double-quotes--single quotes would cause your output  
> to be a series of lines containing the literal $i

Keeping all the different quotes straight--single quotes, double  
quotes, backquotes--has to be one of the hardest things about  
learning shell scripting.

> That should present the whole line to echo as a single argument,  
> and in that case echo won't mess with whitespace inside the  
> argument.  With just $i, the $i is indeed the whole line, but echo  
> sees it as a series of arguments (word-like things), and emits them  
> with a space separating them.

It's not what echo is doing to i; it's how for is interpreting the  
output of cat and putting it into i. When you pass a list to for,  
that list can be space-, tab- or return-delimited, or any combination  
thereof, so it sees each line as a list if it has spaces in it.

> An alternative would be to replace the echo with col, but I think  
> that would have trouble with any line starting with a hyphen.

I've already finished the script, but I'll play around with col  
tomorrow to see how it works. I'll check out those books too. I  
already have the O'Reilly book on csh and tcsh, but it explicitly  
says it doesn't cover shell scripting. So does my Learning Unix for  
Mac OS X. I have two books that say they don't cover shell scripting,  
so I guess it was preordained that I'd have to learn shell  
scripting. :-/

Thanks for the suggestions.