Reading file line by line (with space) in Unix Shell scripting - Issue

shell unix ksh
Sourabh Saxena picture Sourabh Saxena · May 28, 2013 · Viewed 188.8k times · Source

I want to read a file line by line in Unix shell scripting. Line can contain leading and trailing spaces and i want to read those spaces also in the line. I tried with "while read line" but read command is removing space characters from line :( Example if line in file are:-

abcd efghijk
 abcdefg hijk

line should be read as:- 1) "abcd efghijk" 2) " abcdefg hijk"

What I tried is this (which not worked):-

while read line
do
   echo $line
done < file.txt

I want line including space and tab characters in it. Please suggest a way.

Answer

sat picture sat · May 28, 2013

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>''

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