How to read each line from file in Shell script

[Moniphal Say]

Dear all,

I'm not familar with Linux, and shell script.
I want to read line from a file, is there any command to do that?

ex: file.txt
               toto
               titi
               tata
........................
 

I want to read each line (1 line at the time) of this text and print it to std output or assign to any variable.
I've checked with command :

 head and tail 

but with that I can only print out the first n line of the n line at the end of file.

I would appreciate your help
Regards,
Moniphal

[Mark Wuest]

<blockquote>

ex: file.txt
               toto
               titi
               tata
........................

I want to read each line (1 line at the time) of this text and print it to std output or assign to any variable.
I've checked with command :

 head and tail 

but with that I can only print out the first n line of the n line at the end of file.

---

</blockquote>
(Noticed more than one line)

I believe you want the xargs command... Try doing a "man xargs" and see...

Mark
[ August 08, 2005: Message edited by: Mark Wuest ]

[Rick Beaver]

cat <file>

Will print out every line of a file to stdout

If you want to do stuff with each line you need to loop - in your shell, or a script, like this:

for i in `cat file`
do
#do your stuff to the line which is $i
done

Or in bash you can do it like:

for i in $(cat file)
do
#do your stuff to $i here
done

Hope this helps.

[Mark Wuest]

(Need a break from Real Work... )

cat file.txt|xargs -l1 command

will execute command once for each line in file.txt, passing the contents of that line as arguments to command. Command could be "echo" to just spit the lines back out, or "set" to set a variable to the contents of that line.

If each line only has one word, then the for i in `cat` thing will work and is more intuitive. If any line has more than one word, each word in that line will be an interation through the loop. I.e.:

file.txt:
oneword
two words
three words here
 
with the "cat" solution outputs:
oneword
two
words
three
words
here

...back to my Regularly Scheduled Programming...

Mark
[ August 09, 2005: Message edited by: Mark Wuest ]

[Craig Jackson]

Another alternative is to use awk. Awk is something I am not completely familiar with, but it can do some good things, if you take the time to learn it:

    
cat file.txt |
    awk '{
        line = $0
        print line
    }'  

or

cat file.txt | awk '{print $0}  

[Moniphal Say]

Dear all,

Thanks so much for your solution.I've got it now.

Regards,
Moniphal