Put result of awk into an array

Question

When I run the following command on terminal,

awk /984/ $files | awk -F, '{OFS=",";print $1,$4,$17}'

where,

files=`ls`

I get this output:

2013/08/18 12:51:37,11,724
2013/08/18 12:48:02,227,84769

I wish to create a script, run that command and assign the above result to an array in this way: (Separate lines as separate elements)

array[0] = 2013/08/18 12:51:37,11,724
array[1] = 2013/08/18 12:48:02,227,84769

BUT,

neither,

result=($(awk /string/ $files | awk -F, '{OFS=",";print $1,$4,$17}'))

nor,

result2=`awk /string/ $files | awk -F, '{OFS=",";print $1,$4,$17}'`

fulfills my purpose.

How to get an array like I specified?

Answer 1

When you say:

result=($(awk /string/ $files | awk -F, '{OFS=",";print $1,$4,$17}'))

the output would be split by whitespace. Set IFS to a newline character, and you should see the desired result. Say:

IFS=$'\n' result=($(awk /string/ $files | awk -F, '{OFS=",";print $1,$4,$17}'))

instead to capture different lines of output into an array.

Answer 2

I think the problem is in the usage of () in your script. I tried a similar example and got the required output

myarray=(`ls *.sh`)
for f in ${myarray[@]} 
do
    echo $f
done

I think the code of yours should be changed as follows

result=(`awk /string/ $files | awk -F, '{OFS=",";print $1,$4,$17}'`)

Answer 3

To store variables in an array, output needs to be in a form like this:

result=$(one two "more data")
echo ${result[2]}
more data

Data separated by spaces. So tweak your output to give that format.

Can you give an example of what you get out of:

awk '/984/' $files | awk -F, '{OFS=",";print $1,$4,$17}'

It may be shorten to:

awk -F, '/984/ {OFS=",";print $1,$4,$17}' $files