Easy(?) problem for shell script writers

[Scott Holt]

In article <1991May9.151138.21246 at uvm.edu> moore at emily.uvm.edu (Bryan Moore) writes:
>I am trying to write a shell script (AIX 3.1 ksh) that does the following,
>takes the output from an (awk) command, say
>
>STRING1
>STRING2
>STRING3
>
>and use each of those strings as a parameter to the fgrep of
>a system call. 
>
>I want to do a 'ps | fgrep $1' where $1 is each of the above
>strings, but obviously the above is incorrect. 
>
>There must be an easy way to do this. I hope my explanation
>is understandable.

sounds like you want something to the effect of:

PARAMETERS=`awk ...`                       - those are accent characters
if [ "$PARAMETERS" ]
then
   for i in $PARAMETERS
   do
      ps | fgrep $i
   done
else
   echo "Awk found nothing"
fi

the first part is called a command substitution - the command in the
accent characters is executed and the variable (PARAMETERS in this case) is
set to its standard output. The if statement is a check just to make sure
awk found something; it makes sure PARAMETERS is not the null string.

>
>If I should be posting this to another group, let me know ( I'm
>sure someone will!).

yup - I think this is probably a better question for comp.unix.questions or
comp.unix.shell. 

If you really want to dive into this kind of stuff, I would check out
the following books:

   The Korn Shell Command and Programming Language - Bolsky and Korn
or UNIX Shell Porgramming - Revised Edition - Kochan and Wood

- Scott
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