Re: string format

[Mike Stroyan]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 12:03:56PM -0700, eatsubway wrote:
> 
> hello, i have a simple question.  I have a string which i would like to
> format by replacing spaces with newlines and tabs, and also adding a tab to
> the beginning.

  The printf builtin will do that easily.  If you give it a format with one
argument then it will repeat that format for each of multiple arguments.

printf "\t%s\n" $MyVar

  If you really want to only break up your string at spaces then you will
want to momentarily change IFS to just " " instead of the default that
matches spaces, tabs, and newlines.  Be sure to put IFS back to the
default for the benefit of later parts of your shell script that expect
the default.  You can do that with another assignment or with a subshell
like this-

( IFS=" "; printf "\t%s\n" $MyVar )

-- 
Mike Stroyan <mike@stroyan.net>