Simple scripting question

[Tim Medford]

I'm sure this is simple, but I've been hung up for a couple hours on it.

I have a "for" loop which cats a file. The file contains 2 columns of data separated by a space. I want each line to come into the loop as 1 argument instead of two. No matter how I've tried to quote things it keeps treating each word in the document as 1 pass through the loop.

for i in `cat /tmp/rfile`
do
echo $i
done

assuming /tmp/rfile contains:
abc 123
def 456
etc...

The output looks like
abc
123
def
456

I want it to look like
abc 123
def 456

I want the value of $i to be "abc 123" first time, and "def 456" second time.

Thanks in advance!
Tim

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

How about this:

while read i
do
echo $i
done < test

[harry d brown jr]

Add this to your cat:

cat /tmp/rfile|sed "s/ //g"

or if they are possibly tabs and/or spaces:

cat /tmp/rfile|sed "s/[[:space:]]//g"


live free or die
harry

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Let's change the loop a bit:

#!/usr/bin/sh

cat /tmp/rfile | while read i
do
echo "${i}"
done

[Ian Kidd_1]

I tested this and it seems to work fine:

exec 3< /tmp/rfile
i=`line <& 3`
while test "$?" -eq 0
do
echo $i
i=`line <& 3`
done

those are back-tiks rather than single quotes.

[Patrick Wallek]

In my above post the 'test' is the filename you are redirecting back into the little script.

My file looked like this:

# cat test
abc 123
def 456
ghi 789

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Tim:

This will yield what you seek:

while read F1 F2
do
echo $F1 $F2
done < /tmp/rfile

Regards!

...JRF...

[Hai Nguyen_1]

Tim,

Try this small program:

while read LINE
do
echo $LINE
done
Hai

[Rodney Hills]

To expand on the above script,

IFS=""
while read LINE
do
echo $LINE
done
Setting IFS to null will prevent "read" from breaking up the input line into "words".

HTH

-- Rod Hills