How to interate based on words in text? (Shell Scripting) - bash

Question

I have a file currently in the form
location1 attr attr ... attr
location2 attr attr ... attr
...
locationn attr atrr ... attr
What I want to do is go through each line, grab the location (first field) then iterate through the attributes. So far I know how to grab the first field, but not iterate through the attributes. There are also a different number of attributes for each line.
TEMP_LIST=$DIR/temp.list
while read LINE
do
x=`echo $LINE | awk '{print $1}'`
echo $x
done<$TEMP_LIST
Can someone tell me how to iterate through the attributes?
I want to get the effect like
while read LINE
do
location=`echo $LINES |awk '{print $1}'`
for attribute in attributes
do something involving the $location for the line and each individual $attribute
done<$TEMP_LIST
I am currently working in ksh shell, but any other unix shell is fine, I will find out how to translate. I am really grateful if someone could help as it would save me alot of time.
Thank you.

Answer 1

Similar to DreadPirateShawn's solution, but a bit simpler:
while read -r location all_attrs; do
read -ra attrs <<< "$all_attrs"
for attr in "${attrs[#]}"; do
: # do something with $location and $attr
done
done < inputfile
The second read line makes use of bash's herestring feature.

Answer 2

This might work in other shells too, but here's an approach that works in Bash:
#!/bin/bash
TEMP_LIST=temp.list
while read LINE
do
# Split line into array using space as delimiter.
IFS=' ' read -a array <<< $LINE
# Use first element of array as location.
location=${array[0]}
echo "First param: $location"
# Remove first element from array.
unset array[0]
# Loop through remaining array elements.
for i in "${array[#]}"
do
echo " Value: $i"
done
done < $TEMP_LIST

Answer 3

As you're already using awk in your posted code, why not learn how to use awk, as it is designed for this sort of problem.
while read LINE
do
location=`echo $LINES |awk '{print $1}'`
for attribute in attributes
do something involving the $location for the line and each individual $attribute
done<$TEMP_LIST
is written in awk as
#!/bin/bash
tempList="MyTempList.txt"
awk '{ # implied while loop for input records by default
location=$1
print "location=" location # location as a "header"
for (i=2;i<NF;i++) {
printf("attr%d=%s\t", i, $i) # print each attr with its number
}
printf("\n") # add new-line char to end of each line of attributes
}' ${tempList}
If you want to save your output, use awk '{.....}' ${tempList}> ${tempList}.new
Awk has numerous vars that it sets as it reads your files. NF mean NumberOfFields for the current line. So the for loop, starts at field 2, and prints all remaining fields on that line in the format provided (change to suit your needs). The i<=NF drives the ability to print all elems on a line.
Sometimes you'll want the 3rd to last elem on line, so you can perform math on the value stored in NF, like thirdFromLast=$(NF-3). For all variables that are numbers, you can "dereference" it as a value, and ask awk to print the value stored of the $N(th) field. i.e. try
print "thirdFromLast="(NF-3)
print "thirdFromLast="$(NF-3)
... to see the difference that the $ makes on a variable that holds a number.
(For large amounts of data, 1 awk process will be considerably more efficient that using subprocesses to gather parts of files.)
Also work your way through this tutorial grymoire's awk tutorial
IHTH