Parse out key=value pairs into variables

Question

I have a bunch of different kinds of files I need to look at periodically, and what they have in common is that the lines have a bunch of key=value type strings

Answer 1

$ cat file | sed -r 's/[[:alnum:]]+=/\n&/g' | awk -F= '$1=="Var"{print $2}'
Howdy Other

Or, avoiding the useless use of cat:

$ sed -r 's/[[:alnum:]]+=/\n&/g' file | awk -F= '$1=="Var"{print $2}'
Howdy Other

How it works

• sed -r 's/[[:alnum:]]+=/\n&/g'

  This places each key,value pair on its own line.

• awk -F= '$1=="Var"{print $2}'

  This reads the key-value pairs. Since the field separator is chosen to be =, the key ends up as field 1 and the value as field 2. Thus, we just look for lines whose first field is Var and print the corresponding value.