In a Linux shell how can I process each line of a multiline string?

Question

While in a Linux shell I have a string which has the following contents:

cat
dog
bird

and I want to pass each item as an argument to another fu

Answer 1

if you use bash, setting IFS is all you need:

$ x="black cat
brown dog
yellow bird"
$ IFS=$'\n'
$ for word in $x; do echo "$word"; done
black cat
brown dog
yellow bird