Reading tab (\t) separated text from file in shell

Question

my text file looks like this

1   get a   06-05-2000
2   get b   06-05-2001
3   get c   06-05-2002
4   get d   06-05-1442
5   get e   06-05-1998
6   get f   06-05-1909

I want to read what is after the first \t (tab) and store that in varA and what is after \t (the other tab) and store that in varB

using SHELL

Answer 1

In Bash you can do this:

#!/bin/bash
declare -a varA varB
while IFS=$'\t' read -r num first second;do
varA+=("$first")
varB+=("$second")
done <file
echo ${varA[1]} ${varB[1]} 

You can access each element of varA array using index ${varA[$index]} or all of them at once with ${varA[@]}.