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

Question

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  lt  file txt   I want line including space and tab characters in it  Please suggest a way

User · Accepted Answer

Try this  IFS    while read line do     echo  line done  lt  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    lt space gt  lt tab gt  lt newline gt

User · Answer

You want to read raw lines to avoid problems with backslashes in the input  use -r    while read -r line  do    printf   lt  s gt  n    line  done  lt  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  lt  file txt   This now is an equivalent of cat  lt  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

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

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