Ksh/bash: read file including delimiters ???

[DvdPluijm]

Hello there.

I have a script which reads lines from a file. I do this by setting variables in a for loop using cat. Now cat stops reading at a delimiting character, so the line:

This is my example

will set the variable four times. I would really like to put the whole line into one variable. This can probably be done with either awk or sed but I cannot seem to find how to do this.

Hope some of you can help me out.

Greetings ... Danny

[digvijay.gahlot]

You can use an array and later concatenate them

[vsemaska]

The way I get a whole line in a variable is use the 'read' command as follows:

while read LNE
    do
         echo $LNE
    done < filename

Use the -r option if lines will contain backslashes (\).

[cfajohnson]

The way I get a whole line in a variable is use the 'read' command as follows:

while read LNE
    do
         echo $LNE
    done < filename

Use the -r option if lines will contain backslashes (\).

That will not get a whole line of there is leading or trailing
whitespace.

while IFS= read -r LINE
do
  printf "%s\n" "$LINE"
done < filename

[Cabhan]

cfa is correct.

IFS stands for "Internal Field Separator". It contains all of the characters on which input will be split. By default it contains spaces, tabs, and newlines (at least, there may be more).

If you want it to split on newlines, you might do:

IFS=$'\012'
...

Where 012 is the octal value for a newline.

[ghostdog74]

Hello there.

I have a script which reads lines from a file. I do this by setting variables in a for loop using cat. Now cat stops reading at a delimiting character, so the line:

This is my example

will set the variable four times. I would really like to put the whole line into one variable. This can probably be done with either awk or sed but I cannot seem to find how to do this.

Hope some of you can help me out.

Greetings ... Danny

using for loop with cat to iterate file contents has its "quirks". It best to use while loop with read as others have suggested, or one of the other way is to use awk. Depending on what you want to do

awk '
 {
   # the variable $0 stores the line value.
 }
' file

[scm]

Not relevant to the OP but the easiest way to get a whole file into a variable is:

VAR=$(<filename)

Whitespace and newlines will be preserved, but lost if you echo the variable unquoted. To put a specific line in you could use sed:

VAR=$(sed -n ${LINE}p file)

where LINE holds the number of the line you wish to extract.