Reading file line by line (with space) in Unix Shell scripting - Issue

Question

I want to read a file line by line in Unix shell scripting. Line can contain leading and trailing spaces and i want to read those spaces also in the line. I tried with \"whi

Answer 1

You want to read raw lines to avoid problems with backslashes in the input (use -r):

while read -r line; do
   printf "<%s>\n" "$line"
done < file.txt

This will keep whitespace within the line, but removes leading and trailing whitespace. To keep those as well, set the IFS empty, as in

while IFS= read -r line; do
   printf "%s\n" "$line"
done < file.txt

This now is an equivalent of cat < file.txt as long as file.txt ends with a newline.

Note that you must double quote "$line" in order to keep word splitting from splitting the line into separate words--thus losing multiple whitespace sequences.