[bash] How do you run a command for each line of a file?

For example, right now I'm using the following to change a couple of files whose Unix paths I wrote to a file:

cat file.txt | while read in; do chmod 755 "$in"; done

Is there a more elegant, safer way?

I know it's late but still

If by any chance you run into windows saved text file with \r\n instead of \n, you might get confused by the output if your command has sth after read line as argument. So do remove \r, for example:

cat file | tr -d '\r' | xargs -L 1 -i echo do_sth_with_{}_as_line

The logic applies to many other objectives. And how to read .sh_history of each user from /home/ filesystem? What if there are thousand of them?

#!/bin/ksh
last |head -10|awk '{print $1}'|
 while IFS= read -r line
 do
su - "$line" -c 'tail .sh_history'
 done

Here is the script https://github.com/imvieira/SysAdmin_DevOps_Scripts/blob/master/get_and_run.sh

You can also use AWK which can give you more flexibility to handle the file

awk '{ print "chmod 755 "$0"" | "/bin/sh"}' file.txt

if your file has a field separator like:

field1,field2,field3

To get only the first field you do

awk -F, '{ print "chmod 755 "$1"" | "/bin/sh"}' file.txt

You can check more details on GNU Documentation https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Very-Simple.html#Very-Simple

I see that you tagged bash, but Perl would also be a good way to do this:

perl -p -e '`chmod 755 $_`' file.txt

You could also apply a regex to make sure you're getting the right files, e.g. to only process .txt files:

perl -p -e 'if(/\.txt$/) `chmod 755 $_`' file.txt

To "preview" what's happening, just replace the backticks with double quotes and prepend print:

perl -p -e 'if(/\.txt$/) print "chmod 755 $_"' file.txt

If you want to run your command in parallel for each line you can use GNU Parallel

parallel -a <your file> <program>

Each line of your file will be passed to program as an argument. By default parallel runs as many threads as your CPUs count. But you can specify it with -j

if you have a nice selector (for example all .txt files in a dir) you could do:

for i in *.txt; do chmod 755 "$i"; done

bash for loop

or a variant of yours:

while read line; do chmod 755 "$line"; done < file.txt

If you know you don't have any whitespace in the input:

xargs chmod 755 < file.txt

If there might be whitespace in the paths, and if you have GNU xargs:

tr '\n' '\0' < file.txt | xargs -0 chmod 755

Yes.

while read in; do chmod 755 "$in"; done < file.txt

This way you can avoid a cat process.

cat is almost always bad for a purpose such as this. You can read more about Useless Use of Cat.