In Bash, I want to get the Nth word of a string hold by a variable.
For instance:
STRING="one two three four"
N=3
Result:
"three"
What Bash command/script could do this?
This question is related to
bash
A file containing some statements :
cat test.txt
Result :
This is the 1st Statement
This is the 2nd Statement
This is the 3rd Statement
This is the 4th Statement
This is the 5th Statement
So, to print the 4th word of this statement type :
cat test.txt |awk '{print $4}'
Output :
1st
2nd
3rd
4th
5th
No expensive forks, no pipes, no bashisms:
$ set -- $STRING
$ eval echo \${$N}
three
But beware of globbing.
STRING=(one two three four)
echo "${STRING[n]}"
An alternative
N=3
STRING="one two three four"
arr=($STRING)
echo ${arr[N-1]}
Using awk
echo $STRING | awk -v N=$N '{print $N}'
Test
% N=3
% STRING="one two three four"
% echo $STRING | awk -v N=$N '{print $N}'
three
Source: Stackoverflow.com