Unable to pass string from each field into for loop - string

Question

I'm new to Bash scripting, and been writing a script to check different log files if they exist or not, and I'm a bit stuck here.
clientlist=/path/to/logfile/which/consists/of/client/names
# I grepped only the client name from the logfile,
# and piped into awk to add ".log" to each client name
clients=$(grep -i 'list of client assets:' $clientlist | cut -d":" -f1 | awk '{print $NF".log"}')
echo "Clients : $clients"
#For example "Clients: Apple.log
# Samsung.log
# Nokia.log
# ...."
export alertfiles="*_$clients" #path/to/each/client/logfiles
for file in $alertfiles
do
# I will test each ".log" file of each client, if it exists or not
test -f "$file" && echo $file exists || { echo Error: $file does not exist && exit; }
done
The code above greps the client name from the log file, and using awk, added .log at the end of each client field. From the output, I'm trying to pass eachclientname.log from each field into one variable, i.e. alertfiles, and construct a path to be tested for the file existence.
The number of clients is indefinite and may vary from time to time.
The code I have returns the client name as a whole:
"Clients: Apple.log
Samsung.log
Nokia.log
....."
I'm unsure of how to pass each client name one by one into the loop, so that each client name log file will be tested if it exists or not. How can I do this?
export alertfiles="*_$clients" #path/to/each/client/logfiles
I want to have $clients output listed here one by one, so that it returns all client name one by one, and not as a whole thing, and I can pass that into the loop, so the client log filename gets checked one by one.

Answer 1

Use bash arrays.
(BTW: I can't test this as you have not supplied an example of the input data)
clientlist=/path/to/logfile/which/consists/of/client/names
logfilebase=/path/to/where/the/logfiles/should/exist
declare -a clients=($(grep -i 'list of client assets:' $clientlist | cut -d":" -f1))
for item in "${clients[#]}"; do
if [ -e ${logfilebase}/${item}.log ]; then
echo "$item exists"
else
echo "$item does not exist - quit"
exit 1
fi
done

Answer 2

It's really not clear what you are asking. $clients is already a list of tokens which you can loop over, though saving it in a variable seems like an unnecessary waste of memory.
Also, why are you looping over the wildcard and then checking if the files exist? With nullglob you can make sure that file is not looped at all if there are no matches on the wildcard.
I'm guessing your actual question is how to check whether the log files exist in the directory you nominated.
I have refactored your code to do the grep and cut in Awk, too. See useless use of grep
shopt -s nullglob # bash feature
awk -F: 'tolower($0) ~ /list of client assets:/ {
print(tolower($1).log))' "$clientlist" |
while read -r client; do
# some heavy guessing here
for file in path/to/each/"$client"/logfiles/*; do
test -f "$file" && echo "$file" exists || { echo "Error: $file does not exist" && exit; }
done
done