[NTLUG:Discuss] Strings in BASH, an easier way?

[Fred James]

Chris Cox wrote:
> Leroy Tennison wrote:
>   
>> I'm wanting to split a string in BASH.  I know about gawk and maybe sed 
>> but I'm looking for a less involved solution.  The simplest I've found 
>> so far is the cut program but I'm wondering if there is something even 
>> simpler.
>>
>> To add some context, what surfaced this is I wanted to do an apropos on 
>> all programs in my path.  What I have at this point is:
>>
>> for i in `echo $PATH | cut -d: -f1-30 --output-delimiter=" "`; do
>> for j in `ls -1 $i`; do apropos $j; read; done;
>> done
>>
>>     
>
> My solution:
> echo "$PATH" | tr ':' ' ' | xargs ls -1 | xargs -n1 apropos -e
>   
Chris Cox
    "apropos: -e: unknown option"

However, it seems to work without the '-e' option, if this is what the 
output is supposed to look like (see below)

Hope this helps
Regards
Fred James

$ echo "$PATH" | tr ':' ' ' | xargs ls -1 | xargs -n1 apropos | head -10
ls: cannot access /home/fredjame/bin: No such file or directory
/bin:: nothing appropriate
apropos              (1)  - search the whatis database for strings
ar                   (1)  - create, modify, and extract from archives
ar                   (1p)  - create and maintain library archives
arch                 (1)  - print machine architecture
Archive::Cpio        (3pm)  - module for manipulations of cpio archives
Archive::Tar         (3pm)  - module for manipulations of tar archives
Archive::Tar::File   (3pm)  - a subclass for in-memory extracted file 
from Archive::Tar
arch_prctl           (2)  - set architecture specific thread state
badblocks            (8)  - search a device for bad blocks