How do I split a string on a delimiter in Bash?

Question

I have this string stored in a variable:

IN=\"bla@some.com;john@home.com\"

Now I would like to split the strings by ; delimite

Answer 1

I've seen a couple of answers referencing the cut command, but they've all been deleted. It's a little odd that nobody has elaborated on that, because I think it's one of the more useful commands for doing this type of thing, especially for parsing delimited log files.

In the case of splitting this specific example into a bash script array, tr is probably more efficient, but cut can be used, and is more effective if you want to pull specific fields from the middle.

Example:

$ echo "bla@some.com;john@home.com" | cut -d ";" -f 1
bla@some.com
$ echo "bla@some.com;john@home.com" | cut -d ";" -f 2
john@home.com

You can obviously put that into a loop, and iterate the -f parameter to pull each field independently.

This gets more useful when you have a delimited log file with rows like this:

2015-04-27|12345|some action|an attribute|meta data

cut is very handy to be able to cat this file and select a particular field for further processing.