Bash: How to tokenize a string variable?

Question

If I have a string variable who\'s value is \"john is 17 years old\" how do I tokenize this using spaces as the delimeter? Would I use awk?

Answer 1

you can try something like this :

#!/bin/bash
n=0
a=/home/file.txt
for i in `cat ${a} | tr ' ' '\n'` ; do
   str=${str},${i}
   let n=$n+1
   var=`echo "var${n}"`
   echo $var is ... ${i}
done