Split string into array and print each element on a new line with commandline

Question

I'm having a String which is seperated by commas like a,b,c,d,e,f that I want to split into an array with the comma as seperator. Then I want to print each element on a new line. The problem I'm having is that all cli tools I know so far(sed, awk, grep) only work on lines, but how do I get a string into a format that can be used by these tools. What i'v tried so far is

echo "a,b,c,d,e,f" | awk -F', ' '{print $i"\n"}'

How can I get this output

a
b
c
d
e
f

from this input

a,b,c,d,e,f

?

Solution

Sticking with your awk ... just make sure you understand the difference between a field and a record separator :}

echo "a,b,c,d,e,f" | awk 'BEGIN{RS=","}{$1=$1}1'

But the tr solution in the comments is preferable.

Comments

[Angel Todorov]

I'm not clear what you're really asking. You can translate commas to newlines with "tr": echo a, b, c, d | tr , '\n' -- that leaves spaces at the start of the b/c/d lines.

[Costas]

IFS=',' read -a array <<<"a,b,c,d,e,f" ; printf '%s\n' "${array[@]}

[Costas]

@glennjackman tr -s ', ' '\n'

[Costas]

line="a,b,c,d,e,f" ; echo -e ${line//,/\\n}

[Costas]

@glennjackman Yes, you are right.

[Mathias Begert]

What's with the $i?

[tink]

good question; purious (from OPs incantation). will delete :)