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

Just use a for loop:

for i in $(seq 1 $N) ; do read line ; lines+=$line$'\n' ; done

In bash version 4, you can also use the mapfile command.