On 6/2/25 5:58 AM, Duncan Roe wrote:
Hi,
`cut -a ARRAY ...` puts its last line of output in ARRAY[0] and discards any
other elements ARRAY used to have. I tried 3 alternatives:
Thanks for the report. Yes, sometimes marrying the multiple-line-oriented
output of a tool like `cut' to one-dimensional arrays is awkward.
This has to support output that consists of one field (bytes/chars) or
multiple fields (well, fields). When you use -f to cut fields, each
selected field is put into a separate element of the array. When you
select bytes or characters, the selected bytes get put into array[0] as
a single field. There's no current way to assign multiple array elements
when you don't supply -f.
The usual behavior of builtins that take array variable names as arguments
is to unset the array before assigning anything, so I don't see any reason
to change that. If you want to append to an existing array, there are ways
to do that with array `cut' populates.
I think the bigger issue is your alternative B: how to handle multiple
lines of output with a single one-dimensional array.
Alternative B: empty out the array then put lines of output in successive array
elements.
Is it useful to combine multiple selected fields (-f) into one space-
separated field so `cut' can put the selected portions of each line into
a corresponding array element?
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU c...@case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
