How can I assign the match of my regular expression to a variable?

Question

I have a text file with various entries in it. Each entry is ended with line containing all asterisks.

I\'d like to use shell commands to parse this file and assign each

Answer 1

depending on what you want to do with the variables

awk '
f && /\*/{print "variable:"s;f=0}
/\*/{ f=1 ;s="";next}
f{
   s=s" "$0
}' file

output:

# ./test.sh
variable: Field1
variable: Lorem ipsum Data to match
variable: More data Still more data

the above just prints them out. if you want, store in array for later use...eg array[++d]=s