Question

1. Name the script for.sh.  This script will create a shopping list.
2. Ask the user to enter items separated by a space.
3. Read the list.
4. Use a for loop to write (use echo) the items to a file called shopping_list. You should use >> to append the output to the file, so each time the script is run the list should get longer.
5. After the for loop finishes, display (use cat) the contents of the shopping list with 1 item per line.

This is for linux. The output is supposed to read user input, compile a list, append to the list as needed, and be in a list format of one item per line.

This is what I have so far. I am not getting the echo back on my list as my output and it is not appending either.

echo "Please input your list separating the items with a space:"
read items
for items in $list;
do
echo $items
done >> shopping_list
echo "Your shopping list is:"
cat shopping_list
echo "Thank you for your grocery list!"

Answer 1

The below program will help in executing the required operations:

#!/bin/bash -
echo "Enter items separated by a space:"
IFS= read -r LIST

IFS=' ' # split on space only
set -o noglob # disable glob
for item in $LIST; do
printf '%s\n' "$item" || break
done >> shopping_list
echo "Your shopping list is:"
cat shopping_list
echo "Thank you for your grocery list!"


Brief Explanation:

1. IFS - IFS stands for Input Internal Field Separator - it's a character that separates fields. Here we have taken space as the character to separate the fields.
2. set -o noglob - the shell not to expand wildcard characters in file names.
3. LIST- will store the value of list of items separated with space.
4. After the end of for loop we are displaying the file shopping_list using cat.
5. printf - will do the echo back of the list item.