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I have a file named "rules.txt", this file contains the following below:

Jones 2     IP1   1P2

The thing now is that "Jones 2" is supposed to be one word. How do I get my script to understand this?

All lines of the file are consistent. I basically have NAT rule names, start ip address and end ip address. The NAT rule names are separated by spaces and there is a tab between the IP addresses.

I don't want to do any splitting. I just want to read the "Jones 2" and also read IP1 and IP2 as 3 separate things in my while loop.

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    Is it consistent, that the first two (space separated) fields should be treated as one? Is there always exactly two more fields? Are all of the separators space, or are some tab? Commented Dec 2, 2018 at 15:34
  • Please be more specific as to what you expect should happen. Do you want to split each line of the file on sequences of 2 or more spaces (trival with awk -F' {2,}')? What do you want to do with the result? Commented Dec 2, 2018 at 15:38
  • @ctrl-alt-delor yes this consistent in the file I am using. I basically have NAT rule names, start ip address and end ip address. The NAT rule names are separated by spaces and there is a tab between the IP addresses. Commented Dec 2, 2018 at 16:39
  • @StéphaneChazelas I don't want to do any splitting. I just want to read the "Jones 2" and also read IP1 and IP2 as 3 separate things in my while loop. Commented Dec 2, 2018 at 16:40
  • If fields IP1 and IP2 are separated by tabs, then a simple cut -f1 will return Jones 2, and more over cut -f2 will return IP1 and `cut -f3' will return IP2 Commented Dec 2, 2018 at 17:43

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You could start with

perl -pe 's/,/./g;s/  +/,/g' rules.txt

then delimit by comma. Both this in the comment with awk use regular expressions which are the popular tool set for manipulating text.

( +) is a synonym for ( {2,}) both meaning "two or more spaces". The "+" is preceded by two spaces but stackexchange inline code blocks do not respect white spaces...

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