getting touch to accept input from a file

[Pope7]

I made a script that deletes all files over X number of days old from a specific directory. Now I want to expand it to include a whitelist of files that should never be deleted.

Basically, the script will perform "touch" on all files that are listed in whitelist.txt. Then it will delete all files over X days old.

I'm having trouble getting "touch" to accept the contents of the whitelist text file. I've tried several different types of redirection, but the result is always along the lines of: touch: illegal option or a usage explanation.

And to boot, it needs to handle files with spaces in their names.

Thanks

[i92guboj]

while read file; do touch "$file"; done < foo

Or even

cat foo | while read file; do touch "$file"; done

[Pope7]

Thank you. That worked perfectly.

[Cabhan]

As a general note, there is a utility to do this already:

cat whitelist | xargs touch

xargs takes its input and runs the given command on every line of input. Check its man page for more details.