Reading file line by line (with space) in Unix Shell scripting - Issue
You want to read raw lines to avoid problems with backslashes in the input (use -r
):
while read -r line; do
printf "<%s>\n" "$line"
done < file.txt
This will keep whitespace within the line, but removes leading and trailing whitespace. To keep those as well, set the IFS empty, as in
while IFS= read -r line; do
printf "%s\n" "$line"
done < file.txt
This now is an equivalent of cat < file.txt
as long as file.txt
ends with a newline.
Note that you must double quote "$line"
in order to keep word splitting from splitting the line into separate words--thus losing multiple whitespace sequences.
Try this,
IFS=''
while read line
do
echo $line
done < file.txt
EDIT:
From man bash
IFS - The Internal Field Separator that is used for word
splitting after expansion and to split lines into words
with the read builtin command. The default value is
``<space><tab><newline>''