Buttetsu

I know this is a really old topic, but I just hit this issue too and it seems like OP didn't get an answer that fit the workflow he was trying to use (external script) After stumbling through it for a while, I found a really cheesy solution: vars=$1 var1=$(echo $1 | cut -d' ' -f1) var2=$(echo $1 | cut -d' ' -f2) var3=$(echo $1 | cut -d' ' -f3) I can't explain why but the normal bash substring array approaches wouldn't work for me.. so.. cut to the rescue!