Shell script while read line loop stops after the first line

Question

I have the following shell script. The purpose is to loop thru each line of the target file (whose path is the input parameter to the script) and do work against each line.

Answer 1

More generally, a workaround which isn't specific to ssh is to redirect standard input for any command which might otherwise consume the while loop's input.

while read -r LINE; do
   let count++
   echo "$count $LINE"
   sh ./do_work.sh "$LINE" 

The addition of is the crucial point here (though the corrected quoting is also somewhat important; see also When to wrap quotes around a shell variable?). You will want to use read -r unless you specifically require the legacy slightly odd behavior you get without -r.

Another workaround of sorts which is somewhat specific to ssh is to make sure any ssh command has its standard input tied up, e.g. by changing

ssh otherhost some commands here

to instead read the commands from a here document, which conveniently (for this particular scenario) ties up the standard input of ssh for the commands:

ssh otherhost <<'____HERE'
    some commands here
____HERE