You should be able to do this easily with awk. Look at the -F option for defining fields. The follow command line will pluck field 1 and field 5 from your example. $ echo "k.thomas:x:1918:100:Kimaura Thomas:/home/users/k.thomas:/bin/usersh" | awk -F : '{ print $1", "$5 }' Or, in your script . . . user=echo $linea | awk -F : '{ print $1 }' nombre=echo $linea | awk -F : '{ print $5 }' . . . That's about as inelegant as it comes but it should be easy to understand. There is a fantastic (g)awk manual at http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/ presented in a number of formats. _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
thanks Robert,
If i do what you said for linia in `cat /etc/passwd` do user=echo $linea | awk -F : '{ print $1 }' nombre=echo $linea | awk -F : '{ print $5 }' echo "the name is $nombre" echo "zmprov ma $user@$domain displayName $nombre">>$file
x=$[x+1] done
then I have: the name is echo
So it seems i have problems with quotes... either " or ` goes somewhere.... now..on my way to reaad about escape sequences in echo.