How do I iterate through each line of a text file with Bash?
With this script:
echo "Start!"
for p in (peptides.txt)
do
echo "${p}"
done
I get this output on the screen:
Start!
./runPep.sh: line 3: syntax error near unexpected token `('
./runPep.sh: line 3: `for p in (peptides.txt)'
(Later I want to do something more complicated with $p than just output to the screen.)
The environment variable SHELL is (from env):
SHELL=/bin/bash
/bin/bash --version output:
GNU bash, version 3.1.17(1)-release (x86_64-suse-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
cat /proc/version output:
Linux version 2.6.18.2-34-default (geeko#buildhost) (gcc version 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (SUSE Linux)) #1 SMP Mon Nov 27 11:46:27 UTC 2006
The file peptides.txt contains:
RKEKNVQ
IPKKLLQK
QYFHQLEKMNVK
IPKKLLQK
GDLSTALEVAIDCYEK
QYFHQLEKMNVKIPENIYR
RKEKNVQ
VLAKHGKLQDAIN
ILGFMK
LEDVALQILL
One way to do it is:
while read p; do
echo "$p"
done <peptides.txt
As pointed out in the comments, this has the side effects of trimming leading whitespace, interpreting backslash sequences, and skipping the last line if it's missing a terminating linefeed. If these are concerns, you can do:
while IFS="" read -r p || [ -n "$p" ]
do
printf '%s\n' "$p"
done < peptides.txt
Exceptionally, if the loop body may read from standard input, you can open the file using a different file descriptor:
while read -u 10 p; do
...
done 10<peptides.txt
Here, 10 is just an arbitrary number (different from 0, 1, 2).
cat peptides.txt | while read line
do
# do something with $line here
done
and the one-liner variant:
cat peptides.txt | while read line; do something_with_$line_here; done
These options will skip the last line of the file if there is no trailing line feed.
You can avoid this by the following:
cat peptides.txt | while read line || [[ -n $line ]];
do
# do something with $line here
done
Option 1a: While loop: Single line at a time: Input redirection
#!/bin/bash
filename='peptides.txt'
echo Start
while read p; do
echo "$p"
done < "$filename"
Option 1b: While loop: Single line at a time:
Open the file, read from a file descriptor (in this case file descriptor #4).
#!/bin/bash
filename='peptides.txt'
exec 4<"$filename"
echo Start
while read -u4 p ; do
echo "$p"
done
This is no better than other answers, but is one more way to get the job done in a file without spaces (see comments). I find that I often need one-liners to dig through lists in text files without the extra step of using separate script files.
for word in $(cat peptides.txt); do echo $word; done
This format allows me to put it all in one command-line. Change the "echo $word" portion to whatever you want and you can issue multiple commands separated by semicolons. The following example uses the file's contents as arguments into two other scripts you may have written.
for word in $(cat peptides.txt); do cmd_a.sh $word; cmd_b.py $word; done
Or if you intend to use this like a stream editor (learn sed) you can dump the output to another file as follows.
for word in $(cat peptides.txt); do cmd_a.sh $word; cmd_b.py $word; done > outfile.txt
I've used these as written above because I have used text files where I've created them with one word per line. (See comments) If you have spaces that you don't want splitting your words/lines, it gets a little uglier, but the same command still works as follows:
OLDIFS=$IFS; IFS=$'\n'; for line in $(cat peptides.txt); do cmd_a.sh $line; cmd_b.py $line; done > outfile.txt; IFS=$OLDIFS
This just tells the shell to split on newlines only, not spaces, then returns the environment back to what it was previously. At this point, you may want to consider putting it all into a shell script rather than squeezing it all into a single line, though.
Best of luck!
A few more things not covered by other answers:
Reading from a delimited file
# ':' is the delimiter here, and there are three fields on each line in the file
# IFS set below is restricted to the context of `read`, it doesn't affect any other code
while IFS=: read -r field1 field2 field3; do
# process the fields
# if the line has less than three fields, the missing fields will be set to an empty string
# if the line has more than three fields, `field3` will get all the values, including the third field plus the delimiter(s)
done < input.txt
Reading from the output of another command, using process substitution
while read -r line; do
# process the line
done < <(command ...)
This approach is better than command ... | while read -r line; do ... because the while loop here runs in the current shell rather than a subshell as in the case of the latter. See the related post A variable modified inside a while loop is not remembered.
Reading from a null delimited input, for example find ... -print0
while read -r -d '' line; do
# logic
# use a second 'read ... <<< "$line"' if we need to tokenize the line
done < <(find /path/to/dir -print0)
Related read: BashFAQ/020 - How can I find and safely handle file names containing newlines, spaces or both?
Reading from more than one file at a time
while read -u 3 -r line1 && read -u 4 -r line2; do
# process the lines
# note that the loop will end when we reach EOF on either of the files, because of the `&&`
done 3< input1.txt 4< input2.txt
Based on #chepner's answer here:
-u is a bash extension. For POSIX compatibility, each call would look something like read -r X <&3.
Reading a whole file into an array (Bash versions earlier to 4)
while read -r line; do
my_array+=("$line")
done < my_file
If the file ends with an incomplete line (newline missing at the end), then:
while read -r line || [[ $line ]]; do
my_array+=("$line")
done < my_file
Reading a whole file into an array (Bash versions 4x and later)
readarray -t my_array < my_file
or
mapfile -t my_array < my_file
And then
for line in "${my_array[#]}"; do
# process the lines
done
More about the shell builtins read and readarray commands - GNU
More about IFS - Wikipedia
BashFAQ/001 - How can I read a file (data stream, variable) line-by-line (and/or field-by-field)?
Related posts:
Creating an array from a text file in Bash
What is the difference between thee approaches to reading a file that has just one line?
Bash while read loop extremely slow compared to cat, why?
Use a while loop, like this:
while IFS= read -r line; do
echo "$line"
done <file
Notes:
If you don't set the IFS properly, you will lose indentation.
You should almost always use the -r option with read.
Don't read lines with for
If you don't want your read to be broken by newline character, use -
#!/bin/bash
while IFS='' read -r line || [[ -n "$line" ]]; do
echo "$line"
done < "$1"
Then run the script with file name as parameter.
Suppose you have this file:
$ cat /tmp/test.txt
Line 1
Line 2 has leading space
Line 3 followed by blank line
Line 5 (follows a blank line) and has trailing space
Line 6 has no ending CR
There are four elements that will alter the meaning of the file output read by many Bash solutions:
The blank line 4;
Leading or trailing spaces on two lines;
Maintaining the meaning of individual lines (i.e., each line is a record);
The line 6 not terminated with a CR.
If you want the text file line by line including blank lines and terminating lines without CR, you must use a while loop and you must have an alternate test for the final line.
Here are the methods that may change the file (in comparison to what cat returns):
1) Lose the last line and leading and trailing spaces:
$ while read -r p; do printf "%s\n" "'$p'"; done </tmp/test.txt
'Line 1'
'Line 2 has leading space'
'Line 3 followed by blank line'
''
'Line 5 (follows a blank line) and has trailing space'
(If you do while IFS= read -r p; do printf "%s\n" "'$p'"; done </tmp/test.txt instead, you preserve the leading and trailing spaces but still lose the last line if it is not terminated with CR)
2) Using process substitution with cat will reads the entire file in one gulp and loses the meaning of individual lines:
$ for p in "$(cat /tmp/test.txt)"; do printf "%s\n" "'$p'"; done
'Line 1
Line 2 has leading space
Line 3 followed by blank line
Line 5 (follows a blank line) and has trailing space
Line 6 has no ending CR'
(If you remove the " from $(cat /tmp/test.txt) you read the file word by word rather than one gulp. Also probably not what is intended...)
The most robust and simplest way to read a file line-by-line and preserve all spacing is:
$ while IFS= read -r line || [[ -n $line ]]; do printf "'%s'\n" "$line"; done </tmp/test.txt
'Line 1'
' Line 2 has leading space'
'Line 3 followed by blank line'
''
'Line 5 (follows a blank line) and has trailing space '
'Line 6 has no ending CR'
If you want to strip leading and trading spaces, remove the IFS= part:
$ while read -r line || [[ -n $line ]]; do printf "'%s'\n" "$line"; done </tmp/test.txt
'Line 1'
'Line 2 has leading space'
'Line 3 followed by blank line'
''
'Line 5 (follows a blank line) and has trailing space'
'Line 6 has no ending CR'
(A text file without a terminating \n, while fairly common, is considered broken under POSIX. If you can count on the trailing \n you do not need || [[ -n $line ]] in the while loop.)
More at the BASH FAQ
I like to use xargs instead of while. xargs is powerful and command line friendly
cat peptides.txt | xargs -I % sh -c "echo %"
With xargs, you can also add verbosity with -t and validation with -p
This might be the simplest answer and maybe it don't work in all cases, but it is working great for me:
while read line;do echo "$line";done<peptides.txt
if you need to enclose in parenthesis for spaces:
while read line;do echo \"$line\";done<peptides.txt
Ahhh this is pretty much the same as the answer that got upvoted most, but its all on one line.
#!/bin/bash
#
# Change the file name from "test" to desired input file
# (The comments in bash are prefixed with #'s)
for x in $(cat test.txt)
do
echo $x
done
Here is my real life example how to loop lines of another program output, check for substrings, drop double quotes from variable, use that variable outside of the loop. I guess quite many is asking these questions sooner or later.
##Parse FPS from first video stream, drop quotes from fps variable
## streams.stream.0.codec_type="video"
## streams.stream.0.r_frame_rate="24000/1001"
## streams.stream.0.avg_frame_rate="24000/1001"
FPS=unknown
while read -r line; do
if [[ $FPS == "unknown" ]] && [[ $line == *".codec_type=\"video\""* ]]; then
echo ParseFPS $line
FPS=parse
fi
if [[ $FPS == "parse" ]] && [[ $line == *".r_frame_rate="* ]]; then
echo ParseFPS $line
FPS=${line##*=}
FPS="${FPS%\"}"
FPS="${FPS#\"}"
fi
done <<< "$(ffprobe -v quiet -print_format flat -show_format -show_streams -i "$input")"
if [ "$FPS" == "unknown" ] || [ "$FPS" == "parse" ]; then
echo ParseFPS Unknown frame rate
fi
echo Found $FPS
Declare variable outside of the loop, set value and use it outside of loop requires done <<< "$(...)" syntax. Application need to be run within a context of current console. Quotes around the command keeps newlines of output stream.
Loop match for substrings then reads name=value pair, splits right-side part of last = character, drops first quote, drops last quote, we have a clean value to be used elsewhere.
This is coming rather very late, but with the thought that it may help someone, i am adding the answer. Also this may not be the best way. head command can be used with -n argument to read n lines from start of file and likewise tail command can be used to read from bottom. Now, to fetch nth line from file, we head n lines, pipe the data to tail only 1 line from the piped data.
TOTAL_LINES=`wc -l $USER_FILE | cut -d " " -f1 `
echo $TOTAL_LINES # To validate total lines in the file
for (( i=1 ; i <= $TOTAL_LINES; i++ ))
do
LINE=`head -n$i $USER_FILE | tail -n1`
echo $LINE
done
#Peter: This could work out for you-
echo "Start!";for p in $(cat ./pep); do
echo $p
done
This would return the output-
Start!
RKEKNVQ
IPKKLLQK
QYFHQLEKMNVK
IPKKLLQK
GDLSTALEVAIDCYEK
QYFHQLEKMNVKIPENIYR
RKEKNVQ
VLAKHGKLQDAIN
ILGFMK
LEDVALQILL
Another way to go about using xargs
<file_name | xargs -I {} echo {}
echo can be replaced with other commands or piped further.
for p in `cat peptides.txt`
do
echo "${p}"
done
Related
This question already has answers here:
Looping through the content of a file in Bash
(16 answers)
Closed 2 years ago.
I have the following .txt file:
Marco
Paolo
Antonio
I want to read it line-by-line, and for each line I want to assign a .txt line value to a variable. Supposing my variable is $name, the flow is:
Read first line from file
Assign $name = "Marco"
Do some tasks with $name
Read second line from file
Assign $name = "Paolo"
The following reads a file passed as an argument line by line:
while IFS= read -r line; do
echo "Text read from file: $line"
done < my_filename.txt
This is the standard form for reading lines from a file in a loop. Explanation:
IFS= (or IFS='') prevents leading/trailing whitespace from being trimmed.
-r prevents backslash escapes from being interpreted.
Or you can put it in a bash file helper script, example contents:
#!/bin/bash
while IFS= read -r line; do
echo "Text read from file: $line"
done < "$1"
If the above is saved to a script with filename readfile, it can be run as follows:
chmod +x readfile
./readfile filename.txt
If the file isn’t a standard POSIX text file (= not terminated by a newline character), the loop can be modified to handle trailing partial lines:
while IFS= read -r line || [[ -n "$line" ]]; do
echo "Text read from file: $line"
done < "$1"
Here, || [[ -n $line ]] prevents the last line from being ignored if it doesn't end with a \n (since read returns a non-zero exit code when it encounters EOF).
If the commands inside the loop also read from standard input, the file descriptor used by read can be chanced to something else (avoid the standard file descriptors), e.g.:
while IFS= read -r -u3 line; do
echo "Text read from file: $line"
done 3< "$1"
(Non-Bash shells might not know read -u3; use read <&3 instead.)
I encourage you to use the -r flag for read which stands for:
-r Do not treat a backslash character in any special way. Consider each
backslash to be part of the input line.
I am citing from man 1 read.
Another thing is to take a filename as an argument.
Here is updated code:
#!/usr/bin/bash
filename="$1"
while read -r line; do
name="$line"
echo "Name read from file - $name"
done < "$filename"
Using the following Bash template should allow you to read one value at a time from a file and process it.
while read name; do
# Do what you want to $name
done < filename
#! /bin/bash
cat filename | while read LINE; do
echo $LINE
done
Use:
filename=$1
IFS=$'\n'
for next in `cat $filename`; do
echo "$next read from $filename"
done
exit 0
If you have set IFS differently you will get odd results.
Many people have posted a solution that's over-optimized. I don't think it is incorrect, but I humbly think that a less optimized solution will be desirable to permit everyone to easily understand how is this working. Here is my proposal:
#!/bin/bash
#
# This program reads lines from a file.
#
end_of_file=0
while [[ $end_of_file == 0 ]]; do
read -r line
# the last exit status is the
# flag of the end of file
end_of_file=$?
echo $line
done < "$1"
If you need to process both the input file and user input (or anything else from stdin), then use the following solution:
#!/bin/bash
exec 3<"$1"
while IFS='' read -r -u 3 line || [[ -n "$line" ]]; do
read -p "> $line (Press Enter to continue)"
done
Based on the accepted answer and on the bash-hackers redirection tutorial.
Here, we open the file descriptor 3 for the file passed as the script argument and tell read to use this descriptor as input (-u 3). Thus, we leave the default input descriptor (0) attached to a terminal or another input source, able to read user input.
For proper error handling:
#!/bin/bash
set -Ee
trap "echo error" EXIT
test -e ${FILENAME} || exit
while read -r line
do
echo ${line}
done < ${FILENAME}
Use IFS (internal field separator) tool in bash, defines the character using to separate lines into tokens, by default includes <tab> /<space> /<newLine>
step 1: Load the file data and insert into list:
# declaring array list and index iterator
declare -a array=()
i=0
# reading file in row mode, insert each line into array
while IFS= read -r line; do
array[i]=$line
let "i++"
# reading from file path
done < "<yourFullFilePath>"
step 2: now iterate and print the output:
for line in "${array[#]}"
do
echo "$line"
done
echo specific index in array: Accessing to a variable in array:
echo "${array[0]}"
The following will just print out the content of the file:
cat $Path/FileName.txt
while read line;
do
echo $line
done
This question already has answers here:
Looping through the content of a file in Bash
(16 answers)
Closed 2 years ago.
I have the following .txt file:
Marco
Paolo
Antonio
I want to read it line-by-line, and for each line I want to assign a .txt line value to a variable. Supposing my variable is $name, the flow is:
Read first line from file
Assign $name = "Marco"
Do some tasks with $name
Read second line from file
Assign $name = "Paolo"
The following reads a file passed as an argument line by line:
while IFS= read -r line; do
echo "Text read from file: $line"
done < my_filename.txt
This is the standard form for reading lines from a file in a loop. Explanation:
IFS= (or IFS='') prevents leading/trailing whitespace from being trimmed.
-r prevents backslash escapes from being interpreted.
Or you can put it in a bash file helper script, example contents:
#!/bin/bash
while IFS= read -r line; do
echo "Text read from file: $line"
done < "$1"
If the above is saved to a script with filename readfile, it can be run as follows:
chmod +x readfile
./readfile filename.txt
If the file isn’t a standard POSIX text file (= not terminated by a newline character), the loop can be modified to handle trailing partial lines:
while IFS= read -r line || [[ -n "$line" ]]; do
echo "Text read from file: $line"
done < "$1"
Here, || [[ -n $line ]] prevents the last line from being ignored if it doesn't end with a \n (since read returns a non-zero exit code when it encounters EOF).
If the commands inside the loop also read from standard input, the file descriptor used by read can be chanced to something else (avoid the standard file descriptors), e.g.:
while IFS= read -r -u3 line; do
echo "Text read from file: $line"
done 3< "$1"
(Non-Bash shells might not know read -u3; use read <&3 instead.)
I encourage you to use the -r flag for read which stands for:
-r Do not treat a backslash character in any special way. Consider each
backslash to be part of the input line.
I am citing from man 1 read.
Another thing is to take a filename as an argument.
Here is updated code:
#!/usr/bin/bash
filename="$1"
while read -r line; do
name="$line"
echo "Name read from file - $name"
done < "$filename"
Using the following Bash template should allow you to read one value at a time from a file and process it.
while read name; do
# Do what you want to $name
done < filename
#! /bin/bash
cat filename | while read LINE; do
echo $LINE
done
Use:
filename=$1
IFS=$'\n'
for next in `cat $filename`; do
echo "$next read from $filename"
done
exit 0
If you have set IFS differently you will get odd results.
Many people have posted a solution that's over-optimized. I don't think it is incorrect, but I humbly think that a less optimized solution will be desirable to permit everyone to easily understand how is this working. Here is my proposal:
#!/bin/bash
#
# This program reads lines from a file.
#
end_of_file=0
while [[ $end_of_file == 0 ]]; do
read -r line
# the last exit status is the
# flag of the end of file
end_of_file=$?
echo $line
done < "$1"
If you need to process both the input file and user input (or anything else from stdin), then use the following solution:
#!/bin/bash
exec 3<"$1"
while IFS='' read -r -u 3 line || [[ -n "$line" ]]; do
read -p "> $line (Press Enter to continue)"
done
Based on the accepted answer and on the bash-hackers redirection tutorial.
Here, we open the file descriptor 3 for the file passed as the script argument and tell read to use this descriptor as input (-u 3). Thus, we leave the default input descriptor (0) attached to a terminal or another input source, able to read user input.
For proper error handling:
#!/bin/bash
set -Ee
trap "echo error" EXIT
test -e ${FILENAME} || exit
while read -r line
do
echo ${line}
done < ${FILENAME}
Use IFS (internal field separator) tool in bash, defines the character using to separate lines into tokens, by default includes <tab> /<space> /<newLine>
step 1: Load the file data and insert into list:
# declaring array list and index iterator
declare -a array=()
i=0
# reading file in row mode, insert each line into array
while IFS= read -r line; do
array[i]=$line
let "i++"
# reading from file path
done < "<yourFullFilePath>"
step 2: now iterate and print the output:
for line in "${array[#]}"
do
echo "$line"
done
echo specific index in array: Accessing to a variable in array:
echo "${array[0]}"
The following will just print out the content of the file:
cat $Path/FileName.txt
while read line;
do
echo $line
done
How do I iterate through each line of a text file with Bash?
With this script:
echo "Start!"
for p in (peptides.txt)
do
echo "${p}"
done
I get this output on the screen:
Start!
./runPep.sh: line 3: syntax error near unexpected token `('
./runPep.sh: line 3: `for p in (peptides.txt)'
(Later I want to do something more complicated with $p than just output to the screen.)
The environment variable SHELL is (from env):
SHELL=/bin/bash
/bin/bash --version output:
GNU bash, version 3.1.17(1)-release (x86_64-suse-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
cat /proc/version output:
Linux version 2.6.18.2-34-default (geeko#buildhost) (gcc version 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (SUSE Linux)) #1 SMP Mon Nov 27 11:46:27 UTC 2006
The file peptides.txt contains:
RKEKNVQ
IPKKLLQK
QYFHQLEKMNVK
IPKKLLQK
GDLSTALEVAIDCYEK
QYFHQLEKMNVKIPENIYR
RKEKNVQ
VLAKHGKLQDAIN
ILGFMK
LEDVALQILL
One way to do it is:
while read p; do
echo "$p"
done <peptides.txt
As pointed out in the comments, this has the side effects of trimming leading whitespace, interpreting backslash sequences, and skipping the last line if it's missing a terminating linefeed. If these are concerns, you can do:
while IFS="" read -r p || [ -n "$p" ]
do
printf '%s\n' "$p"
done < peptides.txt
Exceptionally, if the loop body may read from standard input, you can open the file using a different file descriptor:
while read -u 10 p; do
...
done 10<peptides.txt
Here, 10 is just an arbitrary number (different from 0, 1, 2).
cat peptides.txt | while read line
do
# do something with $line here
done
and the one-liner variant:
cat peptides.txt | while read line; do something_with_$line_here; done
These options will skip the last line of the file if there is no trailing line feed.
You can avoid this by the following:
cat peptides.txt | while read line || [[ -n $line ]];
do
# do something with $line here
done
Option 1a: While loop: Single line at a time: Input redirection
#!/bin/bash
filename='peptides.txt'
echo Start
while read p; do
echo "$p"
done < "$filename"
Option 1b: While loop: Single line at a time:
Open the file, read from a file descriptor (in this case file descriptor #4).
#!/bin/bash
filename='peptides.txt'
exec 4<"$filename"
echo Start
while read -u4 p ; do
echo "$p"
done
This is no better than other answers, but is one more way to get the job done in a file without spaces (see comments). I find that I often need one-liners to dig through lists in text files without the extra step of using separate script files.
for word in $(cat peptides.txt); do echo $word; done
This format allows me to put it all in one command-line. Change the "echo $word" portion to whatever you want and you can issue multiple commands separated by semicolons. The following example uses the file's contents as arguments into two other scripts you may have written.
for word in $(cat peptides.txt); do cmd_a.sh $word; cmd_b.py $word; done
Or if you intend to use this like a stream editor (learn sed) you can dump the output to another file as follows.
for word in $(cat peptides.txt); do cmd_a.sh $word; cmd_b.py $word; done > outfile.txt
I've used these as written above because I have used text files where I've created them with one word per line. (See comments) If you have spaces that you don't want splitting your words/lines, it gets a little uglier, but the same command still works as follows:
OLDIFS=$IFS; IFS=$'\n'; for line in $(cat peptides.txt); do cmd_a.sh $line; cmd_b.py $line; done > outfile.txt; IFS=$OLDIFS
This just tells the shell to split on newlines only, not spaces, then returns the environment back to what it was previously. At this point, you may want to consider putting it all into a shell script rather than squeezing it all into a single line, though.
Best of luck!
A few more things not covered by other answers:
Reading from a delimited file
# ':' is the delimiter here, and there are three fields on each line in the file
# IFS set below is restricted to the context of `read`, it doesn't affect any other code
while IFS=: read -r field1 field2 field3; do
# process the fields
# if the line has less than three fields, the missing fields will be set to an empty string
# if the line has more than three fields, `field3` will get all the values, including the third field plus the delimiter(s)
done < input.txt
Reading from the output of another command, using process substitution
while read -r line; do
# process the line
done < <(command ...)
This approach is better than command ... | while read -r line; do ... because the while loop here runs in the current shell rather than a subshell as in the case of the latter. See the related post A variable modified inside a while loop is not remembered.
Reading from a null delimited input, for example find ... -print0
while read -r -d '' line; do
# logic
# use a second 'read ... <<< "$line"' if we need to tokenize the line
done < <(find /path/to/dir -print0)
Related read: BashFAQ/020 - How can I find and safely handle file names containing newlines, spaces or both?
Reading from more than one file at a time
while read -u 3 -r line1 && read -u 4 -r line2; do
# process the lines
# note that the loop will end when we reach EOF on either of the files, because of the `&&`
done 3< input1.txt 4< input2.txt
Based on #chepner's answer here:
-u is a bash extension. For POSIX compatibility, each call would look something like read -r X <&3.
Reading a whole file into an array (Bash versions earlier to 4)
while read -r line; do
my_array+=("$line")
done < my_file
If the file ends with an incomplete line (newline missing at the end), then:
while read -r line || [[ $line ]]; do
my_array+=("$line")
done < my_file
Reading a whole file into an array (Bash versions 4x and later)
readarray -t my_array < my_file
or
mapfile -t my_array < my_file
And then
for line in "${my_array[#]}"; do
# process the lines
done
More about the shell builtins read and readarray commands - GNU
More about IFS - Wikipedia
BashFAQ/001 - How can I read a file (data stream, variable) line-by-line (and/or field-by-field)?
Related posts:
Creating an array from a text file in Bash
What is the difference between thee approaches to reading a file that has just one line?
Bash while read loop extremely slow compared to cat, why?
Use a while loop, like this:
while IFS= read -r line; do
echo "$line"
done <file
Notes:
If you don't set the IFS properly, you will lose indentation.
You should almost always use the -r option with read.
Don't read lines with for
If you don't want your read to be broken by newline character, use -
#!/bin/bash
while IFS='' read -r line || [[ -n "$line" ]]; do
echo "$line"
done < "$1"
Then run the script with file name as parameter.
Suppose you have this file:
$ cat /tmp/test.txt
Line 1
Line 2 has leading space
Line 3 followed by blank line
Line 5 (follows a blank line) and has trailing space
Line 6 has no ending CR
There are four elements that will alter the meaning of the file output read by many Bash solutions:
The blank line 4;
Leading or trailing spaces on two lines;
Maintaining the meaning of individual lines (i.e., each line is a record);
The line 6 not terminated with a CR.
If you want the text file line by line including blank lines and terminating lines without CR, you must use a while loop and you must have an alternate test for the final line.
Here are the methods that may change the file (in comparison to what cat returns):
1) Lose the last line and leading and trailing spaces:
$ while read -r p; do printf "%s\n" "'$p'"; done </tmp/test.txt
'Line 1'
'Line 2 has leading space'
'Line 3 followed by blank line'
''
'Line 5 (follows a blank line) and has trailing space'
(If you do while IFS= read -r p; do printf "%s\n" "'$p'"; done </tmp/test.txt instead, you preserve the leading and trailing spaces but still lose the last line if it is not terminated with CR)
2) Using process substitution with cat will reads the entire file in one gulp and loses the meaning of individual lines:
$ for p in "$(cat /tmp/test.txt)"; do printf "%s\n" "'$p'"; done
'Line 1
Line 2 has leading space
Line 3 followed by blank line
Line 5 (follows a blank line) and has trailing space
Line 6 has no ending CR'
(If you remove the " from $(cat /tmp/test.txt) you read the file word by word rather than one gulp. Also probably not what is intended...)
The most robust and simplest way to read a file line-by-line and preserve all spacing is:
$ while IFS= read -r line || [[ -n $line ]]; do printf "'%s'\n" "$line"; done </tmp/test.txt
'Line 1'
' Line 2 has leading space'
'Line 3 followed by blank line'
''
'Line 5 (follows a blank line) and has trailing space '
'Line 6 has no ending CR'
If you want to strip leading and trading spaces, remove the IFS= part:
$ while read -r line || [[ -n $line ]]; do printf "'%s'\n" "$line"; done </tmp/test.txt
'Line 1'
'Line 2 has leading space'
'Line 3 followed by blank line'
''
'Line 5 (follows a blank line) and has trailing space'
'Line 6 has no ending CR'
(A text file without a terminating \n, while fairly common, is considered broken under POSIX. If you can count on the trailing \n you do not need || [[ -n $line ]] in the while loop.)
More at the BASH FAQ
I like to use xargs instead of while. xargs is powerful and command line friendly
cat peptides.txt | xargs -I % sh -c "echo %"
With xargs, you can also add verbosity with -t and validation with -p
This might be the simplest answer and maybe it don't work in all cases, but it is working great for me:
while read line;do echo "$line";done<peptides.txt
if you need to enclose in parenthesis for spaces:
while read line;do echo \"$line\";done<peptides.txt
Ahhh this is pretty much the same as the answer that got upvoted most, but its all on one line.
#!/bin/bash
#
# Change the file name from "test" to desired input file
# (The comments in bash are prefixed with #'s)
for x in $(cat test.txt)
do
echo $x
done
Here is my real life example how to loop lines of another program output, check for substrings, drop double quotes from variable, use that variable outside of the loop. I guess quite many is asking these questions sooner or later.
##Parse FPS from first video stream, drop quotes from fps variable
## streams.stream.0.codec_type="video"
## streams.stream.0.r_frame_rate="24000/1001"
## streams.stream.0.avg_frame_rate="24000/1001"
FPS=unknown
while read -r line; do
if [[ $FPS == "unknown" ]] && [[ $line == *".codec_type=\"video\""* ]]; then
echo ParseFPS $line
FPS=parse
fi
if [[ $FPS == "parse" ]] && [[ $line == *".r_frame_rate="* ]]; then
echo ParseFPS $line
FPS=${line##*=}
FPS="${FPS%\"}"
FPS="${FPS#\"}"
fi
done <<< "$(ffprobe -v quiet -print_format flat -show_format -show_streams -i "$input")"
if [ "$FPS" == "unknown" ] || [ "$FPS" == "parse" ]; then
echo ParseFPS Unknown frame rate
fi
echo Found $FPS
Declare variable outside of the loop, set value and use it outside of loop requires done <<< "$(...)" syntax. Application need to be run within a context of current console. Quotes around the command keeps newlines of output stream.
Loop match for substrings then reads name=value pair, splits right-side part of last = character, drops first quote, drops last quote, we have a clean value to be used elsewhere.
This is coming rather very late, but with the thought that it may help someone, i am adding the answer. Also this may not be the best way. head command can be used with -n argument to read n lines from start of file and likewise tail command can be used to read from bottom. Now, to fetch nth line from file, we head n lines, pipe the data to tail only 1 line from the piped data.
TOTAL_LINES=`wc -l $USER_FILE | cut -d " " -f1 `
echo $TOTAL_LINES # To validate total lines in the file
for (( i=1 ; i <= $TOTAL_LINES; i++ ))
do
LINE=`head -n$i $USER_FILE | tail -n1`
echo $LINE
done
#Peter: This could work out for you-
echo "Start!";for p in $(cat ./pep); do
echo $p
done
This would return the output-
Start!
RKEKNVQ
IPKKLLQK
QYFHQLEKMNVK
IPKKLLQK
GDLSTALEVAIDCYEK
QYFHQLEKMNVKIPENIYR
RKEKNVQ
VLAKHGKLQDAIN
ILGFMK
LEDVALQILL
Another way to go about using xargs
<file_name | xargs -I {} echo {}
echo can be replaced with other commands or piped further.
for p in `cat peptides.txt`
do
echo "${p}"
done
I have noticed for a while that read never actually reads the last line of a file if there is not, at the end of it, a "newline" character. This is understandable if one consider that, as long as there is not a "newline" character in a file, it is as if it contained 0 line (which is quite difficult to admit !). See, for example, the following:
$ echo 'foo' > bar ; wc -l bar
1 bar
But...
$ echo -n 'bar' > foo ; wc -l foo
0 foo
The question is then: how can I handle such situations when using read to process files which have not been created or modified by myself, and about which I don't know if they actually end up with a "newline" character ?
read does, in fact, read an unterminated line into the assigned var ($REPLY by default). It also returns false on such a line, which just means ‘end of file’; directly using its return value in the classic while loop thus skips that one last line. If you change the loop logic slightly, you can process non-new line terminated files correctly, without need for prior sanitisation, with read:
while read -r || [[ -n "$REPLY" ]]; do
# your processing of $REPLY here
done < "/path/to/file"
Note this is much faster than solutions relying on externals.
Hat tip to Gordon Davisson for improving the loop logic.
POSIX requires any line in a file have a newline character at the end to denote it is a line. But this site offers a solution to exactly the scenario you are describing. Final product is this chunklet.
newline='
'
lastline=$(tail -n 1 file; echo x); lastline=${lastline%x}
[ "${lastline#"${lastline%?}"}" != "$newline" ] && echo >> file
# Now file is sane; do our normal processing here...
If you must use read, try this:
awk '{ print $0}' foo | while read line; do
echo the line is $line
done
as awk seems to recognize lines even without the newline char
This is more or less a combination of the answers given so far.
It does not modify the files in place.
(cat file; tail -c1 file | grep -qx . && echo) | while read line
do
...
done
This question already has answers here:
Looping through the content of a file in Bash
(16 answers)
Closed 2 years ago.
I have the following .txt file:
Marco
Paolo
Antonio
I want to read it line-by-line, and for each line I want to assign a .txt line value to a variable. Supposing my variable is $name, the flow is:
Read first line from file
Assign $name = "Marco"
Do some tasks with $name
Read second line from file
Assign $name = "Paolo"
The following reads a file passed as an argument line by line:
while IFS= read -r line; do
echo "Text read from file: $line"
done < my_filename.txt
This is the standard form for reading lines from a file in a loop. Explanation:
IFS= (or IFS='') prevents leading/trailing whitespace from being trimmed.
-r prevents backslash escapes from being interpreted.
Or you can put it in a bash file helper script, example contents:
#!/bin/bash
while IFS= read -r line; do
echo "Text read from file: $line"
done < "$1"
If the above is saved to a script with filename readfile, it can be run as follows:
chmod +x readfile
./readfile filename.txt
If the file isn’t a standard POSIX text file (= not terminated by a newline character), the loop can be modified to handle trailing partial lines:
while IFS= read -r line || [[ -n "$line" ]]; do
echo "Text read from file: $line"
done < "$1"
Here, || [[ -n $line ]] prevents the last line from being ignored if it doesn't end with a \n (since read returns a non-zero exit code when it encounters EOF).
If the commands inside the loop also read from standard input, the file descriptor used by read can be chanced to something else (avoid the standard file descriptors), e.g.:
while IFS= read -r -u3 line; do
echo "Text read from file: $line"
done 3< "$1"
(Non-Bash shells might not know read -u3; use read <&3 instead.)
I encourage you to use the -r flag for read which stands for:
-r Do not treat a backslash character in any special way. Consider each
backslash to be part of the input line.
I am citing from man 1 read.
Another thing is to take a filename as an argument.
Here is updated code:
#!/usr/bin/bash
filename="$1"
while read -r line; do
name="$line"
echo "Name read from file - $name"
done < "$filename"
Using the following Bash template should allow you to read one value at a time from a file and process it.
while read name; do
# Do what you want to $name
done < filename
#! /bin/bash
cat filename | while read LINE; do
echo $LINE
done
Use:
filename=$1
IFS=$'\n'
for next in `cat $filename`; do
echo "$next read from $filename"
done
exit 0
If you have set IFS differently you will get odd results.
Many people have posted a solution that's over-optimized. I don't think it is incorrect, but I humbly think that a less optimized solution will be desirable to permit everyone to easily understand how is this working. Here is my proposal:
#!/bin/bash
#
# This program reads lines from a file.
#
end_of_file=0
while [[ $end_of_file == 0 ]]; do
read -r line
# the last exit status is the
# flag of the end of file
end_of_file=$?
echo $line
done < "$1"
If you need to process both the input file and user input (or anything else from stdin), then use the following solution:
#!/bin/bash
exec 3<"$1"
while IFS='' read -r -u 3 line || [[ -n "$line" ]]; do
read -p "> $line (Press Enter to continue)"
done
Based on the accepted answer and on the bash-hackers redirection tutorial.
Here, we open the file descriptor 3 for the file passed as the script argument and tell read to use this descriptor as input (-u 3). Thus, we leave the default input descriptor (0) attached to a terminal or another input source, able to read user input.
For proper error handling:
#!/bin/bash
set -Ee
trap "echo error" EXIT
test -e ${FILENAME} || exit
while read -r line
do
echo ${line}
done < ${FILENAME}
Use IFS (internal field separator) tool in bash, defines the character using to separate lines into tokens, by default includes <tab> /<space> /<newLine>
step 1: Load the file data and insert into list:
# declaring array list and index iterator
declare -a array=()
i=0
# reading file in row mode, insert each line into array
while IFS= read -r line; do
array[i]=$line
let "i++"
# reading from file path
done < "<yourFullFilePath>"
step 2: now iterate and print the output:
for line in "${array[#]}"
do
echo "$line"
done
echo specific index in array: Accessing to a variable in array:
echo "${array[0]}"
The following will just print out the content of the file:
cat $Path/FileName.txt
while read line;
do
echo $line
done