I perform remote operations on a series of servers. Rather than maintain the server list in several scripts, I consolidated it into a single file called servers.txt  Exciting! The second I did that, I raised my own bar. You’d expect a config file parser to omit comments and blank lines, right? I do.

The anticipated time to write that parser was longer than I expected. In order to save you time, dear reader, I decided to post it here. This sh script reads a file into an array while skipping comment lines and blanks.

Here’s a sample config file:

#
# Comment line 
# Wed Feb 25 19:28:54 EST 2014
homer.joedog.org
 marge.joedog.org

bart.joedog.org
 lisa.joedog.org

burns.joedog.org
# EOF

And here’s a script to parse it:

#!/bin/sh

let X=0
while read line ; do
  if [[ ! $line =~ [^[:space:]] ]] ; then
    continue
  fi
  [ -z "`echo $line | grep '^#'`" ] || continue
  SRV[$X]=$line
  let X=$X+1
done < servers.txt

for (( i=0; i<${#SRV[@]}; i++ )); do
  echo ${SRV[$i]}
done

Here’s the output from the script:

$ sh ./haha
homer.joedog.org
marge.joedog.org
bart.joedog.org
lisa.joedog.org
burns.joedog.org

Here’s another way to coax the data out of the $SRV array. You can convert it into a space separated string and loop through it in a traditional manner:

SRV=${SRV[@]}
for S in $SRV ; do
  echo $S
done

After you guys vet this in the comments, I’ll add it to the sh scripting cheat sheet. Happy hacking.

UPDATE: A reader sends me a one-liner which implements similar functionality.  If you don’t require an indexed array, then it’s only drawback is its perl dependency.

SRV=$(egrep '[^[:space:]$]' servers.txt|egrep -v '^#'|perl -pe 's/^s+//')
for S in $SRV ; do
  echo $S
done