Pasting multiple lines in a shell script.

[J65nko]

Challenge: Write a shell script to accept multiple lines of copied text and store these text lines in a shell variable.

Example text to be copied and pasted:

Europe
=======

Amsterdam
Brussels
Copenhagen

Africa
======

Tunis
Cairo

The empty lines must be preserved! Only exception are the lines after 'Cairo', these should not be copied and thus also not pasted into the variable.

I wrote a script myself, but wonder how somebody else would do it. After at least one person submitted a script, I will share mine here too.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

#!/bin/sh
echo 'Paste text, use <ctrl>+D to indicate the end of the text'
variable=$(cat)
echo "$variable"

EDIT: useful use of cat

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Bump!

C'mon J65nko — I've shown you mine so can I see yours? :P

Did you also use cat? The only other way I could think of was to use bash with GNU's non-standard read -d extension to set the null character as a delimiter with IFS cleared but that's just nasty...

[J65nko]

No I did not use cat. Your use of cat is very clever, but I just did not think of it because I was refining my script that used read.

I am writing a little script to automate entries for the forum News section. I use the shell read to prompt for the title, url and quote.

I did not immediately realize that some news quotes were multiple lines. so I replaced the single read with a shell function that uses multiple reads. In other words I stayed within the limits of my self-imposed programming paradigm

#!/bin/sh

pastetext() {
    echo Paste text. To end paste, just type a '!' as only text at begin of line .....

    while read LINE ; do
      if [ "x$LINE" = "x!" ] ; then break ; fi
      if [ "x$TEXT" = "x" ]; then
           TEXT="$LINE"
      else     
           TEXT="$TEXT\n$LINE"
      fi
    done
}

cat <<END
Make News for daemonforums.org
------------------------------------------------------------------------
END



printf "\nURL of article/source : " 
read URL

printf "\nTitle : " 
read TITLE

printf "\nQuotation or description  : "
pastetext

echo ================= TEXT to paste =============
echo $TITLE
printf "From [url]$URL[/url]:[quote]$TEXT[/quote]\n"
echo ================= END OF TEXT ===============

# end of script