bash script read file variables into local variables

Question

I have a config file with the following content:

msgs.config:

tmsg:This is Title Message!
t1msg:This is T1Message.    
t2msg:This is T2Message.    
pmsg:This is personal Message!

I am writing a bash script that reads the msgs.config file variables and stores them into local variables. I will use these throughout the script. Due to permission I do not want to use the . method (source).

tmsg
t1msg
t2msg
pmsg

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use:

oldIFS="$IFS"
IFS=":"
while read name value
do
    # Check value for sanity?  Name too?
    eval $name="$value"
done < $config_file
IFS="$oldIFS"

Alternatively, you can use an associative array:

declare -A keys
oldIFS="$IFS"
IFS=":"
while read name value
do
    keys[$name]="$value"
done < $config_file
IFS="$oldIFS"

Now you can refer to ${keys[tmsg]} etc to access the variables. Or, if the list of variables is fixed, you can map the values to variables:

tmsg="${keys[tmsg]}"

Answer 2

Read the file and store the values-

i=0
config_file="/path/to/msgs.config"

while read line
do
  if [ ! -z "$line" ]  #check if the line is not blank
  then
   key[i]=`echo $line|cut -d':' -f1`  #will extract tmsg from 1st line and so on
   val[i]=`echo $line|cut -d':' -f2`  #will extract "This is Title Message!" from line 1 and so on
   ((i++))
  fi
done < $config_file

Access the array variables as ${key[0]},${key[1]},.... and ${val[0]},${val[1]}...

Answer 3

In case you change your mind about source:

source <( sed 's/:\(.*\)/="\1"/' msgs.config )

This does not work if any of your values have double quotes.