Use an Essbase Substitution Variable in a Shell Script

A couple of weeks back I was writing some automation scripts on a *nix system (using KornShell, in this case) and needed to do something I haven’t previously tried – grabbing the value of a couple of Essbase substitution variables to use elsewhere in the shell script. I’m sharing a generic version since (as a relatively inexperienced programmer on Unix-like systems) I was pleasantly surprised by how simple the toolset made meeting this requirement, and more generally, the solution I came up with demonstrates several useful techniques from which other *nix neophytes may benefit:

  • Command substitution
  • Inline redirection
  • Filtering multiple lines with grep
  • Extracting tokens from a single line with AWK

Constructive criticism and comments are most welcome!

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