Loop through a comma-separated shell variable

Question

Suppose I have a Unix shell variable as below

variable=abc,def,ghij

I want to extract all the values (abc, def an

Answer 1

Try this one.

#/bin/bash   
testpid="abc,def,ghij" 
count=`echo $testpid | grep -o ',' | wc -l` # this is not a good way
count=`expr $count + 1` 
while [ $count -gt 0 ]  ; do
     echo $testpid | cut -d ',' -f $i
     count=`expr $count - 1 `
done