I'm trying to make an awk command which stores an entire config file as variables.
The config file is in the following form (keys never have spaces, but values may):
key=value
key2=value two
And my awk command is:
$(awk -F= '{printf "declare %s=\"%s\"\n", $1, $2}' $file)
Running this without the outer subshell $(...) results in the exact commands that I want being printed, so my question is less about awk, and more about how I can run the output of awk as commands.
The command evaluates to:
declare 'key="value"'
which is somewhat of a problem, since then the double quotes are stored with the value. Even worse is when a space is introduced, which results in:
declare 'key2="value' two"
Of course, I cannot remove the quotes or the multi-word values cause problems.
I've tried most every solution I could find, such as set -f, eval, and system().
You don't need to use Awk for this but the do this with built-ins available. Read the config file properly using input redirection
#!/bin/bash
while IFS== read -r k v; do
declare "$k"="$v"
done < config_file
and source the file as
$ source script.sh
$ echo "$key"
value
$ echo "$key2"
value two
If source is not available explicitly, POSIX-ly way of doing it would be to do just
. ./script.sh