Read n lines at a time using Bash

Question

I read the help read page, but still don\'t quite make sense. Don\'t know which option to use.

How can I read N lines at a time using Bash?

Answer 1

Simplest method - pretty self-explanatory. It is similar to the method provided by @Fmstrat, except the second read statement is before the do.

while read first_line; read second_line
do
    echo "$first_line" "$second_line"
done

You can use this by piping multiline input to it:

seq 1 10 | while read first_line; read second_line 
do
    echo "$first_line" "$second_line"
done

output:

1 2
3 4
5 6
7 8
9 10