> I need to process table records in a bash script. Currently, I read them > using a while loop and redirection. The table isn't that big (30ish > thousand rows), and performance is adequate, but am always looking for > "better".
Use python, or any other sane language, and don't do bash in python. Anything non-trivial is unreasonably hard to get really right when using shell.
Take this example (even when allowing some fuzz with the variables): > Here's the current code: > declare f1 f3 f8 > while IFS='|' read f1 f3 f8; do > something f8 f3 f1 > done < <(psql -XAt -c "select f1, f3, f8 from some.table_name;")
What happens when f3 a) is NULL? b) contains a '|' character? c) contains spaces? (this one depends on how exactly you're handling the shell variables). This might be fine if your data is only NOT NULL numbers, but that's already quite a limitation on your data.
Good points. Shouldn't be relevant in my situation, but defensive programming never hurts.
