How to split one string into multiple variables in bash shell? [duplicate]

read with IFS are perfect for this:

$ IFS=- read var1 var2 <<< ABCDE-123456$ echo "$var1"ABCDE$ echo "$var2"123456

Edit:

Here is how you can read each individual character into array elements:

$ read -a foo <<<"$(echo "ABCDE-123456" | sed 's/./& /g')"

Dump the array:

$ declare -p foodeclare -a foo='([0]="A" [1]="B" [2]="C" [3]="D" [4]="E" [5]="-" [6]="1" [7]="2" [8]="3" [9]="4" [10]="5" [11]="6")'

If there are spaces in the string:

$ IFS=$'\v' read -a foo <<<"$(echo "ABCDE 123456" | sed 's/./&\v/g')"$ declare -p foodeclare -a foo='([0]="A" [1]="B" [2]="C" [3]="D" [4]="E" [5]=" " [6]="1" [7]="2" [8]="3" [9]="4" [10]="5" [11]="6")'

If you know it's going to be just two fields, you can skip the extra subprocesses like this:

var1=${STR%-*}var2=${STR#*-}

What does this do? ${STR%-*} deletes the shortest substring of $STR that matches the pattern -* starting from the end of the string. ${STR#*-} does the same, but with the *- pattern and starting from the beginning of the string. They each have counterparts %% and ## which find the longest anchored pattern match. If anyone has a helpful mnemonic to remember which does which, let me know! I always have to try both to remember.

If your solution doesn't have to be general, i.e. only needs to work for strings like your example, you could do:

var1=$(echo $STR | cut -f1 -d-)var2=$(echo $STR | cut -f2 -d-)

I chose cut here because you could simply extend the code for a few more variables...